Re: [mif] draft-ietf-mif-dhcpv6-route-option-04 published

[Paul Ebersman <[e-mail]>]

I have seen a reasonable number of sites that have multiple clients on
the same wire (one broadcast domain) who want to be able to
differentiate those clients into different groups, with different
configurations.

This may be for different classes of services, billing to different
departments, different security zones, etc. but they want to be able to
have different prefixes and different routes based on this. While we can
argue that using IP address as a way of differentiating is error prone,
it does work well for a number of companies.

This is not to avoid using an RA. However, an RA can't give different
answers to different clients on the same wire, nor do I think it
should. Current RA design is still clean and simple and we should try to
keep it that way.

DHCP is designed to handle lots of complex configuration information,
with a broad range of different clients having different needs, so it
seems much more appropriate to have DHCP be able to hand out these
configurations, including a default route.

As to whether or not this draft should be in the mif WG, I have been
away from the IETF process long enough that I am not as clear on
standard protocol. I do agree that being able to have different clients
have different answers for default route would be useful to more than
multi-interface hosts (single interface, homenet, etc.). But this draft
seems to have been in mif for quite a while. It does seem that suddenly
changing its working group now is a bit odd; I'd be inclined to keep it
here just so we can keep the draft moving.