Re: [Autoconf] Call for comments to a new AUTOCONF charter proposal.

[Mark Townsley <[e-mail]>]

On 7/5/10 11:23 AM, Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote:
> I'm going to disagree with that, because there are fundamentally
> different requirements - not all MANETs are the same. 

Is there a naming convention for all the different MANET types? How do
you tell them apart?

> The
> proposed solution in the current draft charter is a single
> DHCP server. Putting aside the technical issues in getting that
> to work that Charlie and others have pointed out, let's suppose
> it can be made to work. But there are several of us whose areas
> of interest, and scenarios within that area of interest, would
> regard such a single point of failure (or takeover) as not a good
> solution. Of course just having a decentralised solution would
> not necessarily be sufficient either, hence the comments I've
> made about security issues up front. I don't yet know if a
> solution that does all I would want it to do exists.
> 
> As for how to choose, if one solution is unacceptable, then the
> network would clearly be using the other. More generally it's
> far from the only administratively configured issue in a MANET
> - which routing protocol for example (which also applies in the
> fixed Internet, nothing new there).

I think of autoconfig as being part of a very basic bootstrapping
procedure. If any one thing needs to be ubiquitous, it's this. After the
device has reached a certain level of configuration and connectivity, it
is more possible to negotiate options and report on mismatches. On the
other hand, if basic bootstrapping fails, then all you may have to
troubleshoot with is a dead device.

> 
> But perhaps, rather than jumping straight in with one, or even
> two, approaches, we need people to indicate what they actually
> want/need, and whether the proposal in the draft charter, or
> an alternative (the latter having the disadvantage of being
> quite vague at this point) would give them what they need.

Certainly putting a scope around that which must be automatically
configured and that which may not would be helpful here.

- Mark