Re: Mac OS X 10.7, still no DHCPv6

[Nick Hilliard <nick () foobar org>]

On 28/02/2011 14:59, Joe Abley wrote:
> I'm not sure why people keep
> fixating on that as an end goal. The future we ought to be working
> towards is a consistent, reliable, dual-stack environment. There's no
> point worrying about v6-only operations if we can't get dual-stack
> working reliably.

That's "dual-stack" as in 
"dual-stack-except-one-of-the-stacks-really-doesn't-work-properly-so-we'll-fudge-around-it"? 
:-)

Look, my original point is that RA is a brilliant solution for a problem 
which never really existed.  Now, can we all just ignore RA and work 
towards DHCPv6 because that's what's actually needed in the real world?

> [I also find the knee-jerk "it's different from IPv4, the IETF is
> stupid" memes to be tiring. Identifying questionable design decisions
> with hindsight is hardly the exclusive domain of IPv6; there are
> tremendously more crufty workarounds in IPv4, and far more available
> hindsight. Complaining about IPv6 because it's different from IPv4
> doesn't get us anywhere.]

Sure.  We had lots of hindsight with ipv4, which should have indicated to 
people that we had just the sort of functionality that we needed from dhcp, 
even if dhcpv4 was badly implemented.

But instead of sorting out DHCPv6 and making it do what we needed, we ended 
up with two protocols which ought to complement each other, but don't 
quite, and also can't quite operate independently because of historical 
turf wars in the IETF (now ended, thankfully).

Complaining about knee-jerk reactions would have been fine in the early 
days, but it is 14 years, 3 weeks, 0 days, 2 hours and 8 minutes since I 
sent my first ipv6 ping, and we still haven't got there for basic ipv6 LAN 
connectivity.

We haven't got there because I can't plug in my laptop into any arbitrary 
ipv6-only network and expect to be able to load up ipv6.google.com.

Is that too high a standard to work towards? :-)

Nick