Re: Adoption Call for <draft-troan-6man-universal-ra-option>

[Philip Homburg <[e-mail]>]

>It does exactly what it wa
>s designed
>to do, what we called "the dentist's office scenario" in the early days of IPn
>g design, actually modelled mainly on Appletalk. You can hook a few IPv6 boxes
> together on a wire and they will start talking to each other using SLAAC and 
>link-local addresses. Add a router with a prefix and they will start talking t
>o the world using SLAAC and RA. DHCPv6 is completely unnecessary until the net
>work reaches a certain level of complexity.

I'm confused about the relevance of the "the dentist's office scenario".

As far as I know, the "the dentist's office scenario" is when there is no
router of any kind on a subnet. Both RA and DHCP are equally irrelevant.
That scenario seems completely unrelated to this discussion. Basically the
support we have for the "the dentist's office scenario" is that hosts
automatically configure a link-local address. Nothing more nothing less.

These days, most devices communiate over wifi. And it is hard to find
a wifi access point in a dentist's office that doesn't have a built-in router.

As the current IPv4 network shows, even the smallest networks work fine 
with DHCP. DHCP in modern CPEs is completely automatic. So the notion
that a small network would need something like RA is rather weird.

Where RA goes beyond DHCP is in supporting multiple default routers. Which
is no longer a small, simple network. And in my experience, having multiple
routers announcing their own prefixes, creates interesting corner cases.