At 7:07 PM -0400 5/1/02, Bound, Jim wrote: >Good analysis but something about it don't sit well. My first response is >that Routers are intermediary nodes and require configuration too so have >all the properties that come with that flaw.
Jim, The pedantic answer is no, routers are not necessarily intermediaries according to my definition of that term. Intermediaries are entities or sets of entities that a seeker sends *to* and/or receives *from*, in order to acquire needed info about a target. If those entities are not on the same link as the sender, yes, you need routers to enable that sending and/or receiving, but the routers themselves are not the destination or source of the seeker-intermediary communication (unless a router coincidentally happens to be the home of either seeker or intermediary). The more pragmatic answer is sure, routers are intermediaries. If you are going to allow seekers and targets to be on different links, you necessarily rely on an intermediary of some sort. The goal (for robust plug-and-play) is simply to eliminate *unnecessary* intermediaries, because each intermediary is a source of additional potential failures. For an Internet of more than one link, we obviously need routers to enable communication; the question is whether or not impose a requirement for *more* intermediaries that those. Note also that routers generally run protocols designed to maximize fault tolerance, by allowing arbitrarily redundant topologies, by not having single points-of-failure, and by ensuring that if a physical path exists from A to B, then packets can be (best-efforts) delivered from A to B. That's generally not the case for autoconfiguration servers. >...my domain required management to be set up the way I personally >want it to be set up not the way the canned techno parts came to me >via UPS. Fine, the IPv6 stateful autoconf option is there for those who want to do that. But my neighbor *does* want it to just work out-of- the-UPS-box, and I want IPv6 to be reliably usable by all my neighbors, not just the ones who are geeks. (Well, here in Silicon Valley, it's probably the case that all my neighbors are geeks, but you know what I mean... :-) Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
