Re: The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6

[Brett Watson <brett () the-watsons org>]

On Jun 10, 2011, at 7:03 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:

> I see no reason that additional DHCPv6 options would have to fragment the installed
> base or perpetuate the lack of agreed upon DHCPv6 behavior. In fact, I think that
> adding these options could allow for a set of rules that would be acceptable to all
> and would allow administrators to make choices based on the needs of their
> environments.

Indeed, and agreed. I've got a number of large, multi-national enterprise customers who are in this very situation, 
they need the options because they're trying to get away from a lot of nasty, inherited, legacy configurations. The 
only way they can safely migrate from those is if we (well, IETF, via RFC, and then vendors) provide them the options 
to be flexible.

This thread is somewhat like the DLV/DNSSEC thread on dns-operations. Some are arguing DLV should die, but frankly it's 
giving operators options to *migrate* to DNSSEC rather than making forklift changes in their networks.

I'd simply like to see the option of doing RA, or not, or DHCP with option.routers, etc.

> > People who don't like this should blame their younger selves who failed to show up at the IETF ten years ago to get 
> > this done while DHCPv6 was still clean slate.
>
> There were a lot of people who tried to "show up" at the IETF 10 years ago and talk
> about this stuff from an operational perspective. They were basically told that operators
> don't know what they want and they should shut up and go away and let real men
> do the work.

Indeed, again. I stopped going to IETF (for good or ill) in 1997 or so, but still following the mailing lists. I 
haven't been since, but sounds like this is still the status quo.

-b