Subject: Re: Draft status?

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2002 21:58:49 -0700

Thanks for you comments Brad.

>Interestingly, this informative response doesn't actually answer the 
>question :)

The answer to this question lies in the hands of the IESG. However, it is 
our sincere expectation that this draft will be sent to the RFC editor 
within a week or two.

>I'm not sure what the DHCP reference is supposed to be for.

Good point. That paragraph came from "draft-cheshire-ipv4-acd-01.txt", 
and I forgot to remove the DHCP reference. Draft-04bis now says, "For a 
desktop machine on Ethernet..."

>Is this intended to mean media sense (aka the "link good" light) ?

No, sadly, the "link good" light is misleading. Even when the link light 
is on, the Ethernet switch at the other end may still be silently 
throwing away all your packets. It's quite annoying.

>Is the initial delay intended to avoid a whole stack of machines 
>starting up together crashing down on the poor networking media at once?

Yes. The document mentions this in "2.2 Claiming a Link-Local Address":

   This initial random delay helps ensure that a
   large number of hosts powered on at the same time do not all send
   their initial probe packets simultaneously.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer
 * Chairman, IETF ZEROCONF
 * www.stuartcheshire.org