RE: RFC 5006 status

["STARK, BARBARA H (ATTLABS)" <bs7652@att.com>]

My sense of what's going on in the industry is that there is a lot of
momentum around RFC5006 being used inside home networks. It is widely
stated and believed that clients and OSs exist that only support RFC5006
and not DHCPv6 for DNS (v6 server) acquisition. Therefore, most router
manufacturers and ISPs seem to be leaning towards putting RFC5006 inside
the routers anyway, no matter the status of the RFC. 

I say acknowledge the inevitable and make it a standard. There's no way
to put this genie back in the bottle. 

Beyond RFC5006, I really, really hope that the IETF doesn't try to
duplicate all DHCPv6 stateless config in RA (and I would have preferred
not having DNS in RA -- but, like I said, what's done is done, and the
inevitability of RFC5006 just has to be accepted). 

My concerns are centered around operations, testing devices to make sure
they work, and troubleshooting customer configuration problems. 

When clients are given the ability to choose among multiple ways to do
the same thing, this means that the router/server has to support *all*
of these ways. Even if each is simple on its own, the complexity of
supporting all methods is additive (at a minimum). All methods have to
be coded, and all have to be tested. This doubles the effort of
coding/testing on the routers.

When a customer calls to complain that something isn't working, and it
turns out something didn't get configured, we'll have to figure out
first how it was expecting to get configured. This increases the
complexity of troubleshooting.

What I need, operationally, is predictability. All this discussion
around "let's create half a dozen ways to do the same thing so hosts can
choose the one they like best" is a recipe for failure. Every time the
IETF creates a new way to do something that can already be easily done,
you're introducing complexity and make it that much more likely that
things will go wrong for the average consumer.  Please, please, please
-- Keep It Simple, for every device in the ecosystem.
Barbara