Re: [dhcwg] DHCPv6 router option

["Hemant Singh (shemant)" <shemant at cisco.com>]

Ralph,

Besides Alain Durand who has been asking for this potentially broken
idea to add a router option in DHCPv6, who else is a SP who asked for
this work? Alain also does not represent other cable vendors like
Time-Warner, or Cablevision etc.  For that matter, Alain himself says "I
don't even represent Comcast", so who else from Comcast can speak up and
say this work is needed? 

Let me also bring folks up to speed on Cable IPv6 standards from the
CableLabs.  We finished our Cable IPv6 standards more than three years
back and consumer devices like cable modems already follow the RA model
to get default rtr info and use DHCPv6 as well for ipv6 address
acquisition and other parameters like DNS etc.  A consumer device like a
cable modem has a huge inertia to changing any feature.   Likewise a
CMTS router that terminates the cable modems, being a Service Provide
box, has its own inertia to changing core features.  I spent two years
of my life between 2005=2007 nursing cable modem vendors to fix very
simple and core IPv6 bugs in their chips and I do consider this draft to
be rocking that boat.  The Provisioning system also changes. Then I and
Wes spent time finding show stopper bugs in hosts behind cable modems
and discovered that most operating systems were broken in some core data
forwarding behavior for IPv6 for a specific RA.  I do not like any IPv6
boat rocked even an iota unless there is compelling justification.

So let's not go backward.  Alain and Ralph, please explain what is the
problem in the cable broadband network that this draft is needed?
Please be super specific as to what the problem is.  Sorry, if the good
reasons have been given to the mailer - I have not caught up to mails on
this thread yet.  One year back when we discussed this issue with Alain,
I didn't hear any compelling reason.  What has changed since then?

Thanks,

Hemant