IETF Mulls Working Group For IPv6 Home Networking 104
alphadogg writes "The Internet Engineering Task Force is considering establishing a working group to smooth some of the impending issues around setting up and maintaining IPv6-based Internet connections in homes. 'A collection of protocols needs to be agreed upon, so vendors of equipment used in home networks will have an interoperable suite of protocols available,' said Ralph Droms, a distinguished engineer for Cisco and among those who want to form the IETF working group. Home networking is a fairly new area for the IETF. Many of its standards were designed for large-scale organizational networks, rather than home use."
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
The idea is to come up with a standard for what home routers for IPv6 ought to look like. We'd like to preserve end-to-end transparency, which current home routers break, but at the same time we'd like to avoid creating serious security risks for people who are accustomed to the current home router security model. Support for things like DNSSEC and multihoming are also on the proposed charter.
Home Networking working group description is here. [ietf.org]
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, all of that and one major point you are missing: Doing all of this with as little to no interaction with the user. The current standards assume a network tech to configure the router. With the home user, that is almost never going to happen. They want to create a set of "defaults" that everyone can rely upon for the auto-configuration.