[ipv6hackers] "Stick to limited IPv6 deployments, businesses warned"

[Owen DeLong]

On Sep 5, 2012, at 22:01 , Jim Small <jim.small at cdw.com> wrote:

> Hi Owen,
> 
>>>>> 1)  Do you believe there is a compelling case for RDNSS/RFC 6106?  I
>>>> personally like it but when I have spoken to vendors they pointed out that
>>>> most things do or will support stateless DHCPv6 and they don't see any
>>>> reason to add RDNSS support.  Can you give me some strong cases I can
>> take
>>>> back to vendors for RDNSS?  I want to emphasize that this is not an idle
>>>> promise - any strong case will go straight to the parties who can effect
>>>> change at the vendors.
>>>> I share your view. Personally I don't like SLAAC at all. However it is
>>>> very "explosive" topic where different people have very differed opinion
>>>> about that. Observing the current situation all important vendors (MS,
>>>> Apple) started supporting DHCPv6, so I expect that DHCPv6 will be a
>>>> dominant method of autoconfiguration.
>>> 
>>> So we're pretty much writing off RDNSS?  That what it seems like to me,
>> but just confirming.
>>> 
>> 
>> That's essentially writing off SLAAC which is, IMHO, a pretty bad thing.
> 
> SLAAC is a done deal.  The question is, will network and OS vendors extend their SLAAC implementations to support RDNSS.  From what I

SLAAC is useless in 99% of cases without RDNSS. If you have to implement DHCP, you might as well go all the way.

> can see, it seems like the answer is no.  RDNSS is cool, it's nice for labs and other setup types, and it's a published standard.  However, it's pretty much worthless if routers and mainstream O/S (e.g. Microsoft/Apple) don't support it.  When inquiring about support I found some enthusiasm from developers but they couldn't come up with a business case to justify implementation.  At first I thought there was a case, but the more I dig I'm sorry to say that it doesn't seem like there is one or at least not a strong case.

At this point, looking for a business case for an IPv6 feature is probably not going to yield much more accurate results than many of the people searching for a business case for deploying IPv6.

SLAAC+RDNSS is very useful. SLAAC without RDNSS not so much since you then have to deploy DHCP anyway just to get the basic functionality SLAAC should have originally included.

Yes, lots of enterprises want DHCP for a variety of reasons (though I think that if they had SLAAC+RDNSS, many of the ones that currently think they need DHCP would realize they don't).

> However, I would be very grateful to be proven wrong.

It's hard to prove anything in this area. There isn't enough uptake of either one as yet to really establish good data, unfortunately.

Owen