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

[Doug Barton]

On 9/10/2012 5:25 AM, Gert Doering wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 12:42:17PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
>> SLAAC was an interesting idea for the simple provisioning of dumb
>> devices. Anything more exciting requires DHCP. It's very unfortunate
>> that the anti-DHCP contingent is still fighting a battle that they lost
>> 12 years ago, and delaying wider IPv6 rollout as a result.
> 
> You seem to have misspelled the "anti-SLAAC contingent" in that sentence
> above.

The original promise for SLAAC was that it would be route and prefix
only. Everything else would be DHCP. As far back as 12 years ago people
like me were saying that we would like to have a DHCP-only solution, and
that the problem with address and route only was that it was unlikely to
meet the needs of most real world end user systems. We were told to get
with the program, this is a new protocol, needs new ways of thinking, etc.

Twelve years later I've been thoroughly proven correct on both counts,
and yet the v6 true believers in the IETF are still blocking a complete
DHCP solution.

I'm not anti-SLAAC, never was. I think it's an interesting idea for
provisioning low-end devices that only need to talk to other low-end
devices on the same network. But what was apparent from the very
beginning was that RA was never going to meet the needs of the kinds of
end-user systems that have real humans sitting behind them. This is true
both on purely technical grounds due to things like search domains,
etc.; and also on "layer 9" grounds due to the administrative separation
in most large'ish enterprises between the people who run the network and
the people who run DHCP.

> But that's precisely why the IETF is not going anywhere: folks like you 
> advocate DHCP, and are not willing to accept that other people might be 
> happy with SLAAC+RDNSS, effectively blocking both.

Yes, I was opposed to RDNSS, for the same reasons I have been repeating
for 12 years now. It's not enough, and it's a slippery slope. However,
my being opposed to RDNSS hasn't done 1 tiny thing to prevent
implementors from going forward with a standard that already exists.
It's the market that has spoken on that point, bearing out the truth of
what I have been saying all along.

Doug

-- 

    I am only one, but I am one.  I cannot do everything, but I can do
    something.  And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what
    I can do.
			-- Edward Everett Hale, (1822 - 1909)