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.
And parsing complex text data structures is better?
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.
No, this information must be available in *one* place. It's called a DHCP server. As an operator, this is clearly what I want, both for IPv4 and IPv6. Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no