On 28/02/2011 13:52, Ray Soucy wrote:
The real point, initially at least, for stateless addressing was to make the Link-Local scope work. It's brilliantly elegant. It allows all IPv6 configuration to be made over IPv6 (and thus use sane constructs like multicast to do it).
Wonderful, brilliant design.
Router Advertisements shift gateway and prefix configuration to the routers (which are the devices that actually know if they're available or not) rather than a DHCP server. If you set things up right, making a change to your RA will be seen by hosts almost instantly, and you won't need to go through the headache of waiting for DHCP leases to expire before hosts see that a network isn't available and let go of that route.
Yes, it's all brilliant, wonderful. Elegant too, this idea of having two sets of protocols, because two is always better than one. It provides balance. I will be a lot more sympathetic about listening to arguments / explanations about this insanity the day that the IETF filters out arp and ipv4 packets from the conference network and depends entirely on ipv6 for connectivity for the entire conference. "But we couldn't do that??!?!", I hear you say. I understand completely. Nick