Ralph, there's something that probably bears discussion in dhcwg here..

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, JINMEI Tatuya / [ISO-2022-JP] ����� wrote:
 Information Configuration Behaviour:
    configuring other information excluding addresses through
    Information-request and Reply exchanges

For full clarity, I'd suggest s/Reply/Information-reply/ above, as I think it was what you meant.


But your main point still stands, and I agree this is a problematic
case.  I'd first note I don't think it's a true-or-false thing; we're
just going to define the most reasonable behavior, and this is its
first step.  The background of this statement is the dependency
described in Section 6, which was originally stated in RFC2462, that
if we invoke Host Configuration Behaviour we basically should not
invoke Information Configuration Behaviour.

I'm not sure if I followed this background statement. My assumption has always been that 'host configuration behaviour' would always also include information config as well; a "less specific prefix" in a way :). But I may have missed some earlier consensus or did not read too carefully. (There would certainly be no way to stop Full DHCPv6 client from getting back all the ancillary information in addition to the addresses, right?)


As you pointed out, I don't think this restriction is always
reasonable.  But when we wrote revision 01, we basically tried to
follow the original sense of RFC2462, and we could not find a better
behavior.  Hence the current statement.

OK..

But if we (the wg) can agree on being more flexible, I can think of a
better approach.  For example, if a host which sets M-Policy to 1
cannot get any Advertisement to Solicit messages for some period, it
may make sense to fall back to Information Configuration Behaviour as
you indicated.

Hmm, not maybe as good as I'd hope, but that's a start..

One possible problem of this approach is that RFC3315 requires the
client to send Solicit forever, until it gets an Advertise or Reply,
by specifying MRC and MRD being 0 (Section 17.1.2 of RFC3315).  So, at
least protocol-wise, the fall-back behavior does not (or may not)
conform to the RFC.

Not necessarily: there is nothing in the spec which would prevent sending *additional* messages, e.g., an information-request, and in parallel, also continue sending Solicits forever, right? :-)


I'd guess that would be the 'easiest' solution to this particular problem. Would the client get any feedback from the server if the server did not support solicit, which could be used to trigger sending a parallel information-request, or is the timeout the only option?

But, if we can also agree on modifying RFC3315 and RFC3736 a bit, I
can even think of a bit smarter approach:

 - DHCPv6 servers that only support Information Configuration
   Behaviour should also support the Advertise message and the IA_xxx
   options, but it always return an empty Advertise message to
   Solicit with a status code being NoAddrsAvail.  (This is a
   modification to RFC3736)
 - If a DHCPv6 client that supports both Host/Information
   Configuration Behaviours only receives such an Advertise message,
   it MAY fall-back to Information Configuration Behaviour.  (This is
   a modification to Section 17.2.1 of RFC3315, which requires the
   client ignore such Advertise).

Although the first modification requires additional implementation
complexity to DHCPv6 servers that only conform to RFC3736, the
resulting behavior is still "stateless", and in that sense, should be
lightweight.  So I think it's acceptable.

These might be acceptable as well, but then there could still be implementations which do not deal with this, and you'd have to depend on both ends getting it correct; it would be best if just one end would be enough, like above.


Anyway, there is no doubt that we need further discussions on this
point.  I'm open to other ideas.

Certainly. Perhaps this could be brought up in DHC wg as well? It seems that the most important discussion in this WG is what we consider the RFC2462 interpretation of M/O behaviour to be, and if it's inappropriate, whether we'd like to modify it.


Presumably, initiating DHCPv6 requires running a non-trivial user-land
process.  Hence, I'd dare to say that the transitions are a bigger
problem with M/O flags, as has already been discussed a bit in
security considerations.

Thus I'd like to see some further text, e.g. 1-2 sentences, describing
why M/O transitions are a bigger problem than other inconsistent
information.

I think I said this before, but anyway, personally I'm not really sure if it's a good idea to mention such an implementation-specific thing in a document describing protocol behaviors. However, I don't oppose to that idea now that this is in an Appendix.

I share the concerns, but being in the appendix, and already comparing the situation to something else (which may not be comparable in many situations), the text seems called for..


--
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings
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