DHCPv6 client classification based on DUID.

[Simon Hobson]

Christian Bösch wrote:

>>I know almost nothing about 802.11x, but I 
>>can't help thinking it just moves the problem. 
>>I'm assuming any certificate would be stored in 
>>storage managed by the OS - which for devices 
>>capable of PXE booting is fairly likely to be 
>>disk (or a network volume mounted in much the 
>>same way). Thus the network boot client still 
>>won't have access to it without there being 
>>system wide and environment agnostic storage 
>>for it.
>>
>
>Intel's vPro Technology does this:
>http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/2008/v12i4/5-paper/4-embedded-2.htm

Interesting, but hardly ubiquitous.
Until it's ubiquitous (or at least very widely 
available) then it's not a great deal of use in 
the general case. Until it's useful to support 
it, it's not going to be widely supported by 
software. Until it's supported by software, it's 
of little use and there'll be little demand. And 
so round and round we go.

Same goes for system wide DUID support. What 
would be ideal would be if **EVERY** device came 
with a system wide DUID pre-assigned at the 
factory, easily available to every environment/OS 
the system runs, marked on the device ID label 
and marked on the packaging (like the MAC address 
quite often is now). That would eliminate all 
these discussions about what is and isn't a good 
identifier.

So *all* that's needed is to define a standard 
for it, persuade every hardware manufacturer to 
support it, and persuade every software vendor to 
support it :-/

-- 
Simon Hobson

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