On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:35:18PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
On 22/10/2009 11:30, bmanning@vacation.karoshi.com wrote:
On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 09:20:11PM +1100, Karl Auer wrote:
The RA contains a preference level... maybe that doesn't cut it if multiple routers are sending the same preference level, but presumably that would not happen in a well-tended network.
I point you to a fairly common Internet architecture artifact, the exchange point... dozens of routers sharing a common media for peering exchange.
Bill, could you explain how or why ra or dhcp or dhcpv6 have any relevance to an IXP? Being one of these "artefact" operators - and clearly stuck with a very small dinosaur brain - I am having some trouble understanding the point you're attempting to make here.
Nick
its been a few weeks/years/minutes since I ran an exchange fabric, but when we first turned up IPv6 - the first thing they did was try to hand all the other routers IPv6 addresses. that pesky RA/ND thing... had to turn it off ... RA preference would not work, since there was no -pecking- order - all the routers were peers. we did the manual configuration - no DHCP - it was the only way to ensure things would be deterministic. Hence my comments to Karl re his statement about "not happen in a well-tended network". the point. RA/ND was designed to solve what some of its designers thought would be 80% of the problems. It might just be able to do that - for the limited scope that it has. There are other, more robust, decomposable, resilient configuration tools out there that have capabilities people need that are not currently in RA/ND. and even then, not all architectures are ammenable to automated configuration tools. RA/ND is not a panecea. --bill