nanog mailing list archives

Re: ISP customer assignments


From: "Ricky Beam" <jfbeam () gmail com>
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:43:16 -0400

[here we go again]

On Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:37:49 -0400, William Herrin <herrin-nanog () dirtside com> wrote:
Some clever guy figured out that ... why not
add an extra 64 bits for that very convenient improvement? This is
called "stateless autoconfiguration."

Except that "clever guy" was in fact an idiot blinded by idealism. Not only did he fail to see the security implications of having a fixed address, but he'd apparently spent his entire life under a rock, on an island, on another planet... he completely ignored the fact that people were using DHCP [formerly known as BOOTP] (and have been now for over a decade) to provide machines with FAR MORE than just an address. A machine needs more than just an address to be useful -- something IPv6 users learn very quickly after turning off IPv4 and it's DHCP learned info.

Some even more clever guy figured out that if the first clever guy's
strategy is used, it becomes a trivial matter to track someone
online... ...
stateless autoconfiguration will probably end up being a waste.

It's ALWAYS been a waste. All these supposed "clever guys" failed to learn from the mistakes that preceded them and have doomed us to repeat them... ICMP router discovery (technology abandoned so long ago, I'd forgotten about it), RARP, bootp, dhcp. SLAAC loops us back around to the beginning. Only this time, it's inescapable: I still have to have something on the network spewing RAs for the sole purpose of telling everything to use DHCP instead; there's a hard "class" boundary smack in the middle of a "classless network" because these "clever guys" were lazy and didn't want to figure out ways to avoid address collisions. (something modern IPv6 stacks do by default for privacy -- randomly generated addresses have to be tested for uniqueness.)

--Ricky


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