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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.
> 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
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While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
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.