Ray Soucy wrote:
Respectfully disagree on all points.
The statement that "Android would still not implement DHCPv6 NA, but it would implement DHCPv6 PD." is troubling because you're not even willing to entertain the idea for reasons that are rooted in idealism rather than pragmatism.
In Lorenzo's defense, I believe he is taking the long term pragmatic position, while you appear to be taking the short term idealistic position. For argument's sake... let's assume that a shiny new browser comes along the is designed to limit third party cross site correlation and tracking. It does this by using a different source address for every destination. This browser works fine on any network that allows N>1, but is stuck in the myopic historical world of older browsers on networks where N=1. To the pragmatism point, would you rather have a device like that do N NA requests (creating N ND state entries), or have it do PD (creating 1 ND + 1 Routing entry)? Tony
Very disappointing to see that this is the position of Google.
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 10:58 AM, Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo@colitti.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 10:06 PM, Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:
Actually we do support DHCPv6-PD, but Android doesn't even support DHCPv6 let alone PD, so that's the discussion here, isn't it?
It is possible to implement DHCPv6 without implementing stateful address assignment.
If there were consensus that delegating a prefix of sufficient size via DHCPv6 PD of a sufficient size is an acceptable substitute for stateful IPv6 addressing in the environments that currently insist on stateful DHCPv6 addressing, then it would make sense to implement it. In that scenario, Android would still not implement DHCPv6 NA, but it would implement DHCPv6 PD.
What needs to be gauged about that course of action is how much consensus would be achieved, whether network operators would actually use it (IPv6 has a long and distinguished history of people claiming "I can't support IPv6 until I get feature X", feature X appearing, and people changing their claim to "I can't support IPv6 until I get feature Y"), and how much of this discussion would be put to bed.
That course of action would seem most feasible if it were accompanied by an IETF document that explained the deployment model and clarified what "sufficient size" is.
Universities see a constant stream of DMCA violation notices that need to be dealt with and not being able to associate a specific IPv6 address to a specific user is a big enough liability that the only option is to not use IPv6.
It's not the *only* option. There are large networks - O(100k) IPv6 nodes - that do ND monitoring for accountability, and it does work for them. Many devices support this via syslog, even. As you can imagine, my Android device gets IPv6 at work, even though it doesn't support DHCPv6. Other universities, too. It's obviously not your chosen or preferred mechanism, but it does work.
-- Ray Patrick Soucy Network Engineer University of Maine System
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