On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 10:01:44AM -0400, Chad Oleary wrote:
DHCPv6 doesn't even hand out addresses.
I wasn't going to say anything because Alain already said something. But we've gotten this question from at least two other sources in the last two days who read this and wanted to ask us what that was about. "What were they thinking?" It does seem pretty weird. So hopefully it will help people who don't have a geek to ask if I were to explain what's going on here: There are 'stateless' and 'stateful' ways to implement DHCPv6. You don't get address assignment unless you do 'stateful' DHCPv6 (and then it's complicated by wether you mean 'normal' addresses, 'temporary' addresses which change every renew, or 'prefix delegation'). But DHCPv6 does give out addresses. The easy way to think of DHCPv6 stateful vs stateless is to realize we have the same relationship in DHCPv4 - you can get an address like people normally do with DHCPv4, or you can use a DHCPINFORM if you already have one...so you can get configuration values like nameservers and such without allocating an address. That's all stateless DHCPv6 is. What Alain said is that until 12-18 months prior to today, there have not been very many sources of stateful DHCPv6 implementations. There are several implementations out now, many appearing enabled by default on production software you probably already have in your networks. -- Ash bugud-gul durbatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. Why settle for the lesser evil? https://secure.isc.org/store/t-shirt/ -- David W. Hankins "If you don't do it right the first time, Software Engineer you'll just have to do it again." Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. -- Jack T. Hankins