KRE, >It could just be that people believe that the only way to ever configure >a router is manually, and that any protocol to automate the process is >necessarily flawed. If so, I'd like to understand why, but I think I'd >tend to ignore that sentiment - other than to make sure that implementations >keep on making it possible to manually configure, so that people who >believe this don't have the rug yanked out from under them (and in certain >particular circumstances, I think this probably includes all of us).
It's a good question. My suspicion is that because much of many routers configuration is specific each router, that it doesn't matter to much if it is entered directly into the router with a CLI or web interface, or equivalently typed into some sort of protocol server. Also much of a routers configuration is not amenable to dynamic creation. Unlike hosts there isn't too much labor saving in having a DRCP. Where a protocol might be needed, people have gotten around the lack of a protocol by creating CLI files with an editor and pushing them to the router. The editor makes it easy to make the common parts the same and customize the rest. I think there can even be includes in many vendors CLI files. There are cases (e.g., sub routers at the end of DSL, etc.) where the configurations are very similar, where some sort of DRCP might be useful. I think DHCPv4 is used for this today when the stub router also includes a NAT. Bob -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
