On Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:04:33 -0500, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
They didn't fail. They were designed to complement each other. It just that somewhere along the way people forgot that.
No. They failed. In all respects. The political agendas within IPng were anti-NAT and anti-DHCP. So they designed a system without either completely ignoring the way the real world works. NAT certainly has it's place, but I won't go on any crusades for it. DHCP, however, is an integral part of most networks today. And that's been the case for many years (decades even.) RA is the IPv6 version of stupidity we've forgotten existed in IPv4 -- ICMP router discovery. The idiots that dreamed up RA/SLAAC completely ignored the necessities of modern networking... hostnames, domain names, DNS resolvers, netboot information, ... In the first days, SLAAC looked great because you had IPv4 DHCP filling in everything else, and an IPv4 stack providing support for all that. Now we're seeing DHCPv6 bolted on after the fact. And it's a peicemeal band-aid after band-aid, instead of the logical process of taking DHCPv4 and making all the address fields bigger. If you did, then in one *poof* DHCPv6 would be able to deliver IPv6 addresses for *EVERYTHING* DHCPv4 can. But you still have to have that awefull RA spewed into your network to tell systems to use DHCPv6. --Ricky