Re: new issue: LL34 Better transition to routable from v4LL using DHCP

On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 15:35, Robert Elz wrote:
> On the other hand, I'm not sure that I'd be happy to have a LAN
> with perhaps hundreds of hosts (maybe thousands) all sending
> continuous streams of broadcast packets looking for a DHCP server.
> (A thousand hosts, with a 25 second (avg) delay is 40 broadcast
> packets a second, which is starting to get too high - make that
> 5000 hosts, which is not unreasonable in some switched environments,
> and you're at 200 broadcast packets a second - which is beyond
> inconvenient and into extremely annoying).

Frequent polling is also a very bad idea from the standpoint of power
efficiency. Not all devices are tethered to a power outlet.

This is really a DHCP issue but it would seem preferable to have DHCP
servers announce their presence (and readines to assign addresses) with
a periodic broadcast, rather than have all the clients broadcasting in
an effort to locate a server.

A new DHCPADVERTISE message could easily be specified in a way that is
fully compatible with current DHCP usage.

Alternatively, I suppose servers could just periodically broadcast an
unsolicited DHCPOFFER, but I haven't really thought this through. There
may be reasons why this would not be a good idea.

	MikaL