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Re: RFC 5006 status

On Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:52:36 +0100
Rémi Després <remi.despres@free.fr> wrote:

> HI,
> 
> Le 18 mars 2010 à 10:25, Gert Doering a écrit :
> 
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 10:15:39AM +0100, sthaug@nethelp.no wrote:
> >> Note that this includes having DHCPv6 delivering the default gateway.
> > 
> > This is not really important for us (no cable deployments, and the DSL
> > deployment is PPP based, so the default gateway is always "the other end
> > of the pipe" anyway).  But I understand that other networks need this,
> > so I'm certainly not opposing this.
> 
> Some time ago, Dan Wing proposed (I don't remember where) that RAs could contain DHCP options that are worth advertising to all hosts.
> 
> If generalized, this would permit to avoid reinventing in RAs options that are available in DHCPv6, and yet make the DHCPv6 protocol to be in general unnecessary.
> 
> The simplicity of this approach is IMHO very attractive.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 

Surely if everything is "crammed" into RAs, the only difference between
RAs and stateless DHCPv6 is very slightly less CPU use on the
client/server (i.e. typically router), very slightly less RAM on the
client, and the ability of clients to ask for what they
want and servers being selective about what they give certain clients,
rather than getting everything in RA and then ignoring what they
don't want. Those costs are all so low they're negligible, so I don't
understand why people seem to be so focused on making RAs a slightly
less capable substitute for stateless DHCPv6, at the cost of now having
two nearly identical mechanisms to achieve the same goal.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, "In anything at all, perfection is
finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when
there is no longer anything to take away."

I see adding all the stateless DHCPv6 parameters to RAs as adding
something to RAs that, when added, should be taken away, because a
simple mechanism already exists to perform those functions.

Is there something I'm missing?