Subject: Re: [dhcwg] draft-ietf-ntp-dhcpv6-ntp-opt-00

From: Danny Mayer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:29:52 -0400

Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Sep 17, 2008, at 10:44 PM, John Jason Brzozowski wrote:
>> During the WG meeting I believe some questions were raised about the  
>> packing
>> and or structure of the option.  Shortly after Dublin some additional
>> questions were also posted to the WG mailing list regarding possible
>> sub-options.
> 
> The point I attempted to raise, which I think wasn't entirely  
> understood, is that this draft proposes doing something novel with  
> DHCP options.   It proposes defining suboptions to an option.   It  
> then proposes that the option can appear more than once, and that each  
> instance of that option is an informational unit, in which each  
> suboption of that instance of the option is related.
> 
> The reason I brought this up as a concern is that I suspect that this  
> will create problems for implementors both of servers and of clients,  
> since no other DHCP option works this way.   We do have options with  
> suboptions, but we have never before used this grouping technique.
> 
> Because this is a DHCPv6 option, there is no option aggregation, so we  
> don't have to worry about that.   But the configuration language for  
> various DHCP servers may not be capable of representing options of  
> this type.
> 
> I'm not objecting as a server implementor - I'm pretty sure that the  
> Nominum server can implement this option with relatively minor  
> tweaks.   However, on the client end, I'm aware of at least one client  
> implementation that may require some nontrivial work to support  
> delivering this option to the host in a usable form.
> 
> So if the authors are hoping for wide adoption of this option, this  
> should be a consideration.   Given that the choice of how the option  
> would be represented is largely based on a desire for future-proofing,  
> and not required by the current set of needs for this option, I'm not  
> sure this is a good idea.

I cannot deal with these issues that you are raising since they are
specific to DHCP. I do have some issues that are specific to NTP that I
think should be addressed. I hope to get to it next week.

Danny
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