Subject: RE: Discussion Item - Reconfiguration in DHCPv6 (Items 8, 9, 18 on Co nference Call Agenda)

From: Bernie Volz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 20:50:05 -0400

>> We can always add multicast later...
>
>Agreed.
>
>   Erik

I'm not sure I agree with this. But, it all depends on what you mean by
later. If you're saying not in this revision of the draft, OK. If you're
saying 3 years from now, I think that would be a bad and wrong assumption.
You'll have deployed clients (at least I'm assuming "this time" IPv6 will be
deployed relatively soon - 3 to 4 years ago we were assuming that). Changing
those clients won't come easy because you're assuming we can revise the spec
and they'll all start working - ha!

If no clients support multicast reconfigure, what reason is there for
servers to implement it or use it? If no servers implement or use it, why
build clients that will?

Perhaps I'm being too alarmist here, but I see this as a fairly fundamental
issue and it should be resolved now. I have NO problem in saying that
"clients MUST ignore multicast reconfigure messages unless those message are
authenticated in some manner that is still TBD (perhaps via IPsec, a server
authenticator, or some other means)." This is again somewhat of an issue
since clients will not use these packets until the authentication method is
specified.

- Bernie Volz

---

From: Ralph Droms <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2000 16:06:00 -0400

At 08:50 PM 9/21/00 -0400, you wrote:
>later.

I'm of two minds about "later" - on the one hand, I recognize that,
based on our experience with DHCPv4, we need to get words in the
spec now if we're ever going to deploy multicast reconfigure; on
the other hand, we're already perilously close to slipping
the 9/30 pub date for the next rev of the draft.

- Ralph