Re: Mac OS X 10.7, still no DHCPv6

[Ray Soucy <rps () maine edu>]

SLAAC is fine (even great) for small environments.  For a lot of
enterprise (or in our case, academic) networks you really want the
central control of what addresses hosts get.

Saw some mention of being unsure that it was possible to disable
SLAAC.  Every OS I've tested so far respects the A flag  (which
signals whether a prefix can be used for SLAAC or not) of an RA, so of
course you can disable SLAAC (right from the prefix you advertise).

Apple has said before that they don't want to use DHCPv6 because IPv6
should be "easy".  I'm not really sure what about DHCPv6 is difficult.

Mac OS X 10.7 does support RDNSS (RFC 5001) so it is able to get DNS
server information in an IPv6-only environment.  Of course nobody else
has implemented that yet, making Apple a "special case" host once
again (I don't even think Cisco supports the option in their T series
yet).

Once again, SLAAC and RDNSS is great for quick, small, plug-and-play
networks, and maybe even the opposite end: very very large (mobile)
networks.

But DHCPv6 is a powerful tool and one that shouldn't be thrown out.

With SLAAC, as soon as you enable it every host on a network starts
talking IPv6, by disabling SLAAC and using DHCPv6, you can selectively
respond to hosts and do a phased deployment, enabling IPv6 on a
per-host basis.

Even though we have good native IPv6 available, we've adopted a DHCPv6
only deployment model.  It works great for Windows and Linux systems,
and even Android devices (I believe the iPhone even supports DHCPv6),
really too bad that OS X doesn't support it because on our network it
means they won't be getting IPv6 anytime soon.

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 8:05 AM, TR Shaw <tshaw () oitc com> wrote:
> On Feb 27, 2011, at 6:27 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
>
> > > You're going to have to perform stateless autconfiguration in ipv6 and
> > > provide an ipv4 nameserver at the very minimum for a long time
> >
> > apple is gonna look very very st00pid on world ipv6 day.  and a bunch of
> > folk are considering not turning things off after that day.
>
> Now why would you say that, Randy?  My home is dual stacked with a IPv6 tunnel to HE at my router. All off the shelf. 
> No special config. All Apple. So whats the beef?
>
> Tom



-- 
Ray Soucy

Epic Communications Specialist

Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526

Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System
http://www.networkmaine.net/