Re: [v6ops] New Version Notification for draft-yourtchenko-ra-dhcpv6-comparison-00.txt (fwd)

[Owen DeLong <[e-mail]>]

> Technical people like choice and flexibility, because I think they think about "what ifs" - "what if I was in this situation, what if I was in that situation, and what would I like to tweak to make it work." Non-technical end-users (usually our customers or at least our relatives), who far surpass us in numbers, don't care, shouldn't care and shouldn't have to care. They just want it to work, work reliably, and don't want to have to engage technical people to either make it work or call in assistance if it doesn't work or stops working. Choices, options and parameters make things more complex and therefore more fragile and less robust.

I don’t mind the flipper door, but I really hate it when people remove all the knobs. (The non-technical users shouldn’t open the flipper door).

> We currently have a single mechanism to announce a default gateway, and the default gateway announces itself, out of the box. That makes it pretty hard, if not impossible for that information to be wrong. DHCPv6 for default gateways would in the DHCPv6 relay scenario would require human entry of that information, creating the opportunity for human error, and potential conflict with what RAs are announcing.

It’s not hard at all. All you have to do is put a router on the network that is connected away from, instead of towards the internet and voila, you have arguably “wrong” RAs.

This won’t usually break anything because redirects usually work and even if they don’t, you just put unnecessary load on the network and the router that can’t forward the packets. However, if that router doesn’t know the correct address for the other routers, then your RAs will be truly wrong and things do break.

Owen