On 6 feb 2009, at 0:55, David W. Hankins wrote:
Exhibit A: With IPv6 Address Autoconfiguration (tm) (patent
pending), you
don't need DHCP. *face plant* The IPv4 mistake you've NOT learned
from
here is "rarp". DCHP does far more than tell a host was address
it should
use.
Actually it goes further back than rarp; IPv6 RA is actually more
closely related to IPv4 ICMP Router Advertisements
It makes more sense to look at it like this. In the 1990s we had:
- IPv4: manual configuration
- IPv4: DHCP
- IPX: router advertised network prefix + MAC address
- AppleTalk: router advertised network prefix + random number
IPv6 gives us all of these.
Let's just say it's a slightly restricted (feature-limited?) RIP.
RIP is a routing protocol, not an address configuration protocol.
But yeah, in that the static->RARP->BOOTP->DHCP progression was a
dialogue between operators and IETF, IPv6 has basically thrown that
dialogue out with the bathwater, and we're having it all over again.
The problem is that DHCP seemed like a good idea at the time but it
doesn't make any sense today. We know that parsing complex binary data
formats is asking for security problems. Also, whenever you want to
put something new in DHCP you must update the client and server
SOFTWARE. Because on the clients, address configuration is a very
fundamental thing, this is something buried deep inside the system
where it's hard to make changes by anyone other than the OS vendor.
What we need is a simple, fast, efficient way to distribute the basic
information that a host needs to start sending and receiving packets
and a pointer to a place where additional location dependent
configuration information can be found. That would be: address+prefix,
gateway and (arguably) DNS and then something like a URL for a server
that has the config info. The system and applications can then load
information from the config server over HTTP in XML format or some such.
