I fully agree that host autoconfiguration seems like a reasonable technical solution to the problem of changing providers. The importance of providing autoconfig for IPv6 *on day one* must be stressed over and over again. You, as a member of the IESG, could certain help with this.

Host autoconfiguration is not the complete solution for easily changing providers. There are many places cuurently where IP network numbers appear: Router configuration files DNS configuration files DHCP configuration files Security filters (TCP wrapper, etc.) SNMP configuration files NETBIOS over TCP/IP host tables I'm sure that others can add to this list. In our organization, at least, not all of these things fall under the control of those of us who run the backbone network. Even when they do, there are still enough of them to make the job of changing them all non-trivial. So implementing host autoconfiguration will be a significant step towards making it easy to change providers, it is not the complete solution to the problem. While it's certainly true that the format of configuration files is not a protocol issue, it is important that the protocols provide a way of passing the necessary information around or making it unnecessary for it to be kept. Roger Fajman Telephone: +1 301 402 4265 National Institutes of Health BITNET: RAF@NIHCU Bethesda, Maryland, USA Internet: RAF@CU.NIH.GOV