Android (lack of) support for DHCPv6

Fri Jun 12 02:48:19 UTC 2015

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Laszlo Hanyecz <laszlo at heliacal.net> wrote:
> Lorzenzo is probably not going to post anymore because of this.

Oh, I imagine we'll all need to take a time-out after this thread;
I know it's got my back fur all riled up, too.  :(

> It looks to me like Lorenzo wants the same thing as most everyone here, aside from the university net nazis, and he's got some balls to come defend his position against the angry old men of NANOG.  Perhaps the approach of attacking DHCP is not the right one, but it sounds like his goal is to make IPv6 better than how IPv4 turned out.

If we had the choice of waiting to make IPv6 better, that might
be a more laudable position; if we were having this discussion
ten years ago, when v4 addresses were still plentiful, pushing
for the best future of IPv6 would have been great.

Unfortunately, with v4 exhaustion, companies face the
decision of "is v6 easy enough to deploy so that I can
just do that, or do I stick with v4 and more layers of NAT
to stretch my meagre v4 resources out as long as I can."

Dogmatic positions like this swing the pendulum firmly
towards the latter, unfortunately.

He's got balls, I'll definitely say that much.  I just feel
like his balls are coming to the party ten years too late.  :(

> Things like privacy extensions, multiple addresses and PD are great because they make it harder for people to do address based tracking, which is generally regarded as a desirable feature except by the people who want to do the tracking.  DHCPv6 is a crutch that allows operators to simply implement IPv6 with all the same hacks as IPv4 and continue to do address based access control, tracking, etc.  It's like a 'goto' statement - it can be used to do clever things, but it can also be used to hack stuff and create very hard to fix problems down the road.  I think what Lorenzo is trying to do is to use his influence/position to forcefully prevent people from doing this, and while that may not be the most diplomatic way, I admire his courage in posting here and trying to reason with the mob.

Without address tracking, devices aren't going to be
allowed onto corporate networks.  You may hate that,
but legal liability makes that an absolute necessity.
Like it or not, regardless of whatever privacy extensions,
multiple addresses, and PD you push for, in order to
use those devices on corporate networks, there must be
a way to track which devices had those addresses.

> -Laszlo

Matt
PS--any discussion of Lorenzo's balls on my part is purely
my personal opinion, and is not undertaken on behalf of
any employer.  In other words, nobody pays me to talk
about Lorenzo's balls.