Re: draft-gont-6man-managing-privacy-extensions-00.txt

[james woodyatt <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 9, 2011, at 2:01 AM, Ran Atkinson wrote:
> 
> <http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gont-6man-managing-privacy-extensions-00.txt>
> 
> I recommend that folks read the above draft.  I haven't seen the
> I-D announcement get cross-posted to the IPv6 WG, perhaps due to
> the volume of recent I-D postings, and the topic seems relevant.


About the H-bit in the PIO it proposes, the draft says this:

   When set, this bit indicates that
   hardware-derived addresses SHOULD be used when configuring IPv6
   addresses as a result of Stateless Address Autoconfiguration.  When
   not set, this bit indicates that Privacy Extensions SHOULD be enabled
   when configuring IPv6 addresses as a result of Stateless Address
   Autoconfiguration

Which makes the bit worse than useless.  If the PIO contains A=1, then both EUI-64 and privacy IID are eligible under the current regime, but this draft says only that one or the other SLAAC alternative SHOULD be used depending on the state of the bit, without explicitly saying whether the complementary alternative SHOULD NOT be used.

I'm not sure if the intent is to make a signal for hosts that network administration regards any particular SLAAC alternative as NOT RECOMMENDED, but if it is, then the draft should explicitly say so.  Of course, if the draft were to changed to do that, then I would lodge the same complaints that I lodged previously against I-D.yhb-6man-ra-privacy-flag... for the same reasons.

This draft has a long struggle ahead of it, if you ask me.


--
james woodyatt <[e-mail]>
member of technical staff, core os networking