Re: [dhcwg] draft-ietf-dhc-dhcpv6-opt-nisconfig-05.txt

On Feb 5, 2004, at 5:59 PM, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> as an occasional network configurer, I think it seems like a pain in 
> the backside to have to configure two separate configuration tools 
> that speak two separate configuration protocols in order to get two 
> pieces of config info (the ipv4 address and the ipv6 address) to a 
> single application on a network client.
>
> and as an applications programmer, I think it's a pain in the 
> posterior to have to make two unrelated queries and get two unrelated 
> responses back, and having to use local configuration, tea leaves, 
> chicken entrails or scientific wild-assed guessing to figure out how 
> to combine them, just becaue my client software runs on a dual-stack 
> host.

You are totally right.   This sucks.   The problem is that the 
alternative is even worse.   This isn't even strictly an IPv4/IPv6 
issue - consider what happens when you have two network interfaces that 
are configured by two different servers in two different administrative 
domains!

Unfortunately, we haven't been able to think of a way to specify how 
DHCP devices should deal with this problem.  It's easy to specify a 
scenario, and then say what should be done in that scenario, but it's 
hard to specify a set of rules that will work in all scenarios.

Anyway, you have to support both protocols, because you might be on an 
IPv4-only or IPv6-only network, so even if we specified a way to 
configure your IPv4 stack with DHCPv6, you'd still have to implement a 
DHCPv4 client.   :'(

It's possible that when we have some real-world experience with this, 
we might have enough information to make a stab at specifying a general 
solution to this problem, but I don't think we do right now, and if we 
tried, we'd wind up in ten-years-later land.

If you have an idea for a general solution, we'd all like to hear it, 
by the way.   But please remember that we're not complete dummies, and 
try to think about six chess moves ahead rather than just stating an 
obvious, but wrong, idea, because we've probably already considered and 
discarded that idea.

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