Re: [Anima] some comments about ACP connect

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 12:51:12PM +1300, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > Generally, I think that NOC hosts should not autoconfigure (SLAAC or
> > stable private address) addresses, as they ought to be manually
> > configured.  I am open to discussion here.
> 
> I can see that for conventional management tools. I will just observe
> that GRASP discovery doesn't need to be seeded with any well known
> addresses (except the GRASP LL multicast address) so GRASP is completely
> indifferent to how NOC hosts get their unicast addresses. In fact we
> could easily create a full NOC discovery mechanism over GRASP. I built
> a MUD Manager discovery mechanism in the hackathon yesterday, and any
> NOC server could be discovered the same way. It's probably worth
> re-reading RFC8368 before discussing further.
> 
> (In my code, I gave preference to ULAs over GUAs, but GRASP doesn't even
> care about that).

Rereading Michaels sentence again after my previous email answer,
i would lke to double down on what Brian said:

today, there is a lot of manual configuration of NOC server IP addresses
on each route for various services. The DNS-SD drafts i wrote (expired,
to be revived, when i got ACP off my back) are exactly to overcome this
problem by learning via DNS-SD (ACP GRASP as transport ;-) those NOC
host services.

Once you have this service discovery, NOC hosts do not need well-known
IP addresses anymore, but can use SLAAC, or DHCP on the ACP connect LAN
- whatever the operator prefers. Of course, ther is IMHO no need for
DHCP, but its likely that in the non-ACP part of the network, some
service parameters may still be learned from DHCP (such as DNS servers),
and i have seen few deployments that tried to combine DHCP service
discovery with SLAAC address assignment. Besides, there is also litte
address tracking with SLAAC, and operators like to be able to track
addresses. Aka: As long as we do not have stronger arguments either way,
i wouldn't get into the middle of the SLAAC vs. DHCP debate. I just
want to make sure that we do not need well-known IP addresses.

Cheers
    Toerless