North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: DHCPv6, was: Re: IPv6 Finally gets off the ground

  • From: David W. Hankins
  • Date: Mon Apr 16 17:44:58 2007

On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 01:59:36PM +1200, Perry Lorier wrote:
> >When you can plug your computer in, and automatically (with no
> >clicking) get an IPv6 address, 
> 
> Router Advertisements let you automatically configure as many IPv6 
> addresses as you feel like.

Remember that in XP, which Iljitsch recently cited to support his
claim of "years of operating system support," you must click IPv6
into your configuration.  It probably wants your XP install disc,
or something like that.

In my point of view, this does not cut the mustard for such words.


Let's be clear:

"There has been router and operating system support for years" is
a statement which predicates that the World has no technical excuse
for not running IPv6 globally edge-to-edge already.

I think such a statement is fundamentally flawed.


> This could be a fairly simple defacto standard if network operators 
> start using it.  This is an obvious weak link in the chain at this point 
> tho.

Does this represent "years of router and operating system support?"

My answer is "no."

> once you have DNS you can use the WPAD proxy auto discovery thingamabob.

...if you also had your domain suffix (unless you are suggesting
that there have been WPAD records at the root for "years"?).

RTADV won't help you here (tho they keep talking about putting
domain-search and nameservers in it), and neither will DHCPv6
as it turns out (it carries a domain-search list, but not "your
domain suffix" which is more what WPAD should really want).

This is not "years of operating system support."

What has had "years of operating system support," is the
unfortunate practice of acquiring option code 252 in DHCPv4.

> >and solve your dynamic dns problems (as IPv4 set top boxes do today), 
> 
> Updating your forward/reverse dns via DNS Update messages isn't that 
> uncommon today.

On Enterprise networks using GSS-TSIG, sure.

On ISP networks, I think the only time end-hosts try to update
their reverse DNS directly is when they're participating in a
rather unfortunate, and unintentional, distributed DoS against
the root servers.

Which, oddly enough, you mention next.

Actual reverse dns updates for end hosts (and not their NAT
gateways) is relatively uncommon, owing to the fact that such
end hosts generally are on RFC1918 addresses.

> http://www.caida.org/publications/presentations/ietf0112/dns.damage.html
> 
> where hosts are trying to update the root zone with their new names.

I'm confused by what you're trying to argue.  Are you suggesting
that AS112 represents "years of operating system support for
IPv6"?

> So you can get from A to D without requiring DHCPv6.

...I hope you see that this is only so long as you require some
clicking instead.

This is all well and good for those of us who have sufficient
growth (or equivalent feminine metaphor) on our chins, which we
enjoy stroking thoughtfully while determining what all these
"correct configurations" are.

But I don't think "it works for bearded geeks" is setting the
bar high enough when we use lofty words like "supported by
routers and operating systems for years."

-- 
David W. Hankins	"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer		you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.	-- Jack T. Hankins

Attachment: pgp00018.pgp
Description: PGP signature