Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx>: > You wouldn't care about touch points if even a large number were > reliable and secure, and that is the key. I'm not sure I understand that sentence. What's a "touch point"? And what does security have to do with any of this? My issue is with how much administrative overhead my network interface imposes on me over its entire lifecycle, potentially including multiple changes iof ISP. > At the consumer level I think > it's VERY important that most people not care about the IP address they > are assigned. In fact it's important that they not have to know > anything about what they're addressed! And you're right: it doesn't > matter whether it's v4 or v6. So. Where are the gaps? Well. Ideally, when I plug my router into the ISP's cable, it should invisibly negotiate an IP address range with the ISP as DHCP does now. Thereafter, whenever a machine initializes its network access, it should (1) grab an IP address from the range Ideally, the address allocations should be stable even as machines are inserted and deleted onm my local net, so other peoples' DNS caches don't become invalid every time I have to reboot a server. Perhaps base them on a hash of the requesting machine's MAC address, with backoff in the (rare) collision cases? (2) propagate updates to my DNS servers so lookup-by-name works. This is important. As long as this isn't true, DHCP is useless for servers. I should be able to declare my firewall and redirection rules by local host name and have everything work, -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a> _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf