Remember "Internet-In-A-Box"?

Tony Hain alh-ietf at tndh.net
Fri Jul 17 07:07:59 UTC 2015


Ricky Beamwrote:
> On Wed, 15 Jul 2015 22:32:19 -0400, Mark Andrews <marka at isc.org> wrote:
> > You can blame the religious zealots that insisted that everything DHCP
> > does has to also be done via RA's.
> 
> I blame the anti-DHCP crowd for a lot of things. RAs are just dumb.
> There's a reason IPv4 can do *everything* through DHCP -- hell, even boot
> menu lists are sent in dhcp pakcets.

The reason is that DHC was the longest lived working group in IETF history.
It took over 15 years of changes to get what you consider a working
implementation. At the point the IPv6 RA was specified, it was very
difficult for people to get addressing and routers consistently configured
via dhcp, let alone everything else that was added. 

> 
> >> The XP box is in an even worse situation if you try to run it on a
> >> v6-only network.
> >
> > Which is fixable with a third party DHCPv6 client / manual
> > configuration of the nameservers.
> 
> Just like no "IP stack" was fixable in the 80's. No. Just, No. There are
millions
> upon millions of internet users I wouldn't trust to double click
setup.exe.
> 
> > None of which is the fault of the protocol.
> 
> Actually, it's 100% the fault of the protocol. IPv6-only networking has
been a
> cluster-f*** from day one. And it still doesn't f'ing work today.
> Until there is *A* standard to implement, that stands still for more than
an
> hour before something else "critical" gets bolted on to it, people are
going
> to continue to ignore IPv6.

So if you want to wait for a stable specification, why did you ever
implement IPv4? Here we are 35+ years later and there are still changes to
the base IPv4 header in the works.
http://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup?doc=draft-dreibholz-ipv4-flowlabel  How
could anyone ever implement a target that has continued to move for that
long a period? With over 5,000 documents describing the continuous changes
to IPv4, there is obviously "A standard to implement" in there somewhere.

Clearly some people have figured out how to deploy IPv6, but if you want to
wait, that is your choice. 

> 
> Yes, my XP machines work fine with IPv6... on a network using SLAAC,
> where
> IPv4 (DHCPv4) is still enabled and providing the various bits necessary to
do
> anything other than ping my gateway.

The XP implementation was never expected to last as long as it did, The
delay in shipping the Vista/W7 stack resulted in quite a bit of
functionality being late. The entire point of the XP implementation was to
put a working API in the hands of app developers. It was never intended to
be used in IPv6-only networks 15 years after its release. 

Tony





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