Mitigating the effects of SLAAC renumbering events (draft-ietf-6man-slaac-renum)

[Vasilenko Eduard]

Hi all,

The router could split information between RAs (and send it at different intervals).
It may be difficult to guess what is stale and what is just "not in this RA".

Fernando proposing (not documented yet in draft-ietf-6man-slaac-renum-04)
re-asking the router by RS and using timers (size of timers is not proposed yet)
To guess that router has probably supplied the full set of information
And we could start concluding what is stale.

There is an alternative proposal to signal by ND flag that "this RA has the complete set of information"
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-vv-6man-nd-prefix-robustness-02
... then you could immediately make your reliable conclusion on what is stale.

IMHO: Clear signaling that "information is complete in this RA" is better than guessing by timers.
It is the more robust solution.

If you have an opinion on this matter,
Please send a message to ipv6 at ietf.org

Thanks.

Eduard
-----Original Message-----
From: ipv6-ops-bounces+vasilenko.eduard=huawei.com at lists.cluenet.de [mailto:ipv6-ops-bounces+vasilenko.eduard=huawei.com at lists.cluenet.de] On Behalf Of Fernando Gont
Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2022 1:40 PM
To: ipv6-ops at lists.cluenet.de
Subject: Mitigating the effects of SLAAC renumbering events (draft-ietf-6man-slaac-renum)

Folks,

We have been discussing the potential problems associated with SLAAC renumbering events for a while now -- one of the most common cases being ISPs rotating home prefixes, and your devices ending up with stale/invalid addresses.

We have done quite a bit of work already:

   * Problem statement: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8978
   * CPE recommendations: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9096

But there's still some work to do to address this issue: The last remaining it is to improve SLAAC such that hosts can more gracefully deal with this renumbering events.

In that light, IETF's 6man has been working on this document: 
https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-6man-slaac-renum-04.txt

And we have proposed a simple algorithm for SLAAC (an extension, if you
wish) that can easily help, as follows:

     If you (host) receive an RA that contains options, but not all
     of the previously-received options/information, simply send a
     unicast RS to the local-router, to verify/refresh that such missing
     information is still valid. If the information is stale, get rid of
     it.

I presented this algorithm at the last IETF meeting (https://youtu.be/eKEizC8xhhM?t=1308).

(You may find the slides here: 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/114/materials/slides-114-6man-improving-the-robustness-of-stateless-address-autoconfiguration-slaac-to-flash-renumbering-events-00)

Finally, I've sent draft text for the specification of the algorithm
here: 
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/KD_Vpqg0NmkVXOQntVTOMlWHWwA/

We would be super thankful if you could take a look at the draft text (i.e.,
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/KD_Vpqg0NmkVXOQntVTOMlWHWwA/)
and provide feedback/comments.

If you can post/comment on the 6man wg mailing list (https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6), that´d be fabulous.
But we'll appreciate your feedback off-line, on this list, etc. (that'd still be great ;-) )

Thanks in advance!

Regards,
--
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: fgont at si6networks.com
PGP Fingerprint: F242 FF0E A804 AF81 EB10 2F07 7CA1 321D 663B B494