Re: Disabling ip4 and IPV6 on F20RC1

[Tore Anderson <tore fud no>]

* Pavel Simerda

> There's no correct handling of RA lifetimes until the standards are
> fixed, anyway. That is something I feel much more motivated for, so
> if you want to discuss that with me, feel free. A wiki page might be
> useful for that.

The Linux kernel handles RA lifetimes correctly and in a
standards-compliant way, to the best of my knowledge. So do the other
major operating systems. RFC 4861 seems to describe this in a rather
straight-forward way to me, so I am therefore not sure how exactly you
feel that the standards need "fixing"?

> It's only a bit sad that the whole handling of lifetimes is there
> because of a (in my opinion shortsighted) decision to develop a
> stateless autoconfiguration protocol for IPv6. Single-lifetime
> contract-based protocol like DHCP seems to be a much better option in
> the long term and this is one of the things that delays IPv6
> deployment without any real advantages. But that's nothing more than
> an opinion of mine.

An opinion you're entitled to, and I'm not necessarily disagreeing with
you either. However, the IPv6 standard is what it is, and
implementations should aim to conform to the standard as faithfully as
possible. After all, the very purpose of having a standard is to make
independent implementations work predictably and be able to interoperate
with each other.

NetworkManager deviates from the standard, there is no question about
it. This makes building networks that rely on RAs for high-availability
router service difficult, as Anders Blomdell recently found out. (I
believe this is the only way to do HA with Linux-based routers, which
aggravates the issue.)

Tore