DHCPv6 and MAC Address inclusion

[Ted Lemon]

On Jan 25, 2012, at 5:05 AM, Simon Hobson wrote:
> I find that a bit strange. Surely the best way to deal with that is to "name and shame" non-compliant implementations, rather than deny everyone something that could be useful "just in case".

That simply doesn't work.   I wouldn't even know who to talk to, and I've come to wonder whether some implementors might not actually have any shame to appeal to.   We wanted something that would work.

> Lets face it, there are still plenty of ways to make a non-compliant implementation - such as splitting an LL or LLT identifier to extract the hardware address, something that is now encouraged by it not being present in the request packets in it's own field/option.

There's nothing wrong with extracting the hardware address from DUID-LT or DUID-LLT as long as you don't use it as a database key for referencing the assigned IP address, independent of the rest of the DUID.   The reason we said you shouldn't do it was to preclude that behavior.   You're right that some implementation could do it, but it wouldn't be by mistake—they'd have to read the spec carefully and deliberately violate it.   That's not the problem we were concerned about—we were concerned about people who didn't bother to read the spec carefully.

> It's easy to forget that IPv4 used to be as hard as people are finding IPv6 - at least for those of us with "a few years" under our belts. I recall my first contact with IP - this strange system, with funny numbers, something called a netmask, and seemingly (in the days before search engines) no documentation to be found. Back then, getting online meant a SLIP dialup from a single machine - putting a network online meant running a Unix box (or very expensive router) to do the routing.
> The idea of being able to unpack a small plastic box, put in a username and password, and get a whole network online in minutes was just science fiction.

Exactly.   We are actually trying to make it a lot easier than that with IPv6; in particular, there's a big push to get those plastic boxes to happen sooner rather than later.

> My ISP (Plusnet) is doing a trail of IPv6 to end users. "It works just fine", but I'm still struggling with some of the pieces. The ISC client doesn't support PPP interfaces, and Wide-DHCP client doesn't appear to support the scripting ability I *think* I want. So there's an element of experimenting and adjusting my requirements to see if I can close that gap.

You might also want to check out Dibbler.