[141922] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The stupidity of trying to "fix" DHCPv6
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nick Hilliard)
Tue Jun 14 12:15:58 2011
X-Envelope-To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:15:34 +0100
From: Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org>
To: Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu>
In-Reply-To: <BANLkTi=tDa4_T4_u0_Fg5fQUA_zOJHL5cQa8H=dTrw28AhH+Aw@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 14/06/2011 16:12, Ray Soucy wrote:
> The point was you shouldn't base protocol design around the
> possibility that someone might tell it to do something you don't want
> it to do; otherwise you'll end up with a one-size-fits-all protocol
> that has zero flexibility (and might not even be functional at all).
sensible engineering dictates that design should aim to be fail-safe. I.e.
not "failsafe" in the common usage of the term (= doesn't fail), but rather
cogniscent of the fact that all systems fail from time to time, and when
they do, they ought to fail in such a way that the collateral damage is
minimised. This principal is recodified in various ways ("be liberal in
what you accept", etc), but the underlying idea is the same.
In IPv6-land, we appear not to have learned the lessons from ipv4 history,
and our vendors aren't yet shipping switches with native RA- and DHCPv6-
guard (yes, there are some exceptions to the former).
Nick
