Help with DHCPv6 client-identifiers

[Alex Bligh]

--On 18 November 2011 13:48:33 +0100 Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no> wrote:

> head-in-sand... You may want to consider:

In some deployments yes. In others, nearly everything you have written is
irrelevant. For instance, We use DHCP to give IP addresses to virtual
machines. We know the MAC address we give them, as we build the NIC (and
indeed sometimes filter other MAC addresses out). We know the networking
topology. We don't know the host OS which determines how the DHCP packet is
built. This works fine on IPv4. It's completely broken on IPv6 as there is
no reasonable way to identify the client, so we just dropped DHCP support
for IPv6, and use auto config instead. We could instead have looked at the
MAC address the packet actually comes from (i.e. in the ethernet layer) as
we don't happen to use relays or similar, but really life is too short - I
would support a patch to dhcpd to do that.

In my view, it was an error not to put the hardware address in the DHCPv6
packet as an option. The server after all does not have to use it. It use
any of the multiplicity of other ways of allocating addresses.

-- 
Alex Bligh