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IT Pros Blast Google Over Android's Refusal To Play Nice With IPv6
alphadogg writes: The widespread popularity of Android devices and the general move to IPv6 has put some businesses in a tough position, thanks to Android's lack of support for a central component in the newer standard. DHCPv6 is an outgrowth of the DHCP protocol used in the older IPv4 standard – it's an acronym for 'dynamic host configuration protocol,' and is a key building block of network management. Nevertheless, Google's wildly popular Android devices – which accounted for 78% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in the first quarter of this year – don't support DHCPv6 for address assignment.
Obviously at this point it isn't a bug, its a "feature." The only question is why did Google decide to push this negative feature?
I remember first hearing about IPv6 around 1997.
Here we are almost 20 years later still sucking on the IPv4 teat. I'd say Google might as well take their fucking time on this "feature".
It's not like anyone is in a damn hurry, regardless of what's running dry.
Anybody who moves between networks, like a cell phone? You still do route aggregation in IPv6, so even if your host ID (lower 64 bits of the address) don't change, the network ID (upper 64 bits) will when you move between networks. Otherwise you would need to propagate every single device in the world into the global routing table, and that doesn't scale.
I read the internet for the articles.
> it's an acronym for 'dynamic host configuration protocol,' and is a key building block of network management.
The above explanation is a clear proof that Slashdot is not a "news for nerds" site anymore.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
DHCPv6 is a bad bolt-on, IPV6 always had superior solutions designed since the 90s (when it had another name)
IPv6 supports stateless IPv6 address assignment using SLAAC (StateLess Address AutoConfiguration). There is no need for a DHCP server. There are a number of reasons why using DHCPv6 to allocate individual addresses is a bad idea. If you've ever operated a DHCP server, you know about DHCP's failure modes, so I don't have to tell you. However, people get comfortable operating DHCP servers, and there's job security in it, so there are a lot of IPv4 old-timers who simply can't imagine a world without DHCP.
Speaking as one of the authors of RFC 3315, I think that Google is, if not right, at least not wrong. I would not personally want to have to set up a DHCPv6 server just to allocate individual IPv6 addresses. Talk about driving a nail with a sledgehammer. DHCPv6 is a great solution for the problem of configuring CPE routers with IPv6 prefixes. Addresses? Not so much.