The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Host address availability recommendations' (draft-ietf-v6ops-host-addr-availability-07.txt) as Best Current Practice This document is the product of the IPv6 Operations Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Benoit Claise and Joel Jaeggli. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-v6ops-host-addr-availability/ Technical Summary This document recommends that networks provide general-purpose end hosts with multiple global IPv6 addresses when they attach, and describes the benefits of and the options for doing so. Working Group Summary This particular draft has not been controversial; it borders on stating the obvious, and certainly states a consensus of IPv6 operators and designers in the IETF. It does, however, recommend a change from current general practice with DHCP/DHCPv6, a change that the author's companies are explicitly exploring and finding useful, which is to allocate a prefix to a host rather than a single address. Document Quality This is not a protocol, it is a proposal regarding IPv6 protocol deployment practice. That said, yes, there are multiple implementations. Windows, MacOSX, Linux, and other operating systems expect to use multiple addresses in the same prefix simultaneously, and common practice using SLAAC directly supports this. The issue has to do with DHCP/DHCPv6 address allocation, which a network operator might restrict to a single address unnecessarily. Personnel The Document Shepherd is Fred Baker. The AD is Joel Jaeggli.
