Arturo Servin wrote:
Even at that time and even on small end user LANs, it is
better to let the gateway manage the address configuration
state in centralized fashion than to have, so called, SLAAC,
which is full of address configuration state, which is
maintained in fully distributed manner involving all the nodes.
YMMV.
I was working on TCP/IP, Novell and AppleTalk nets in the mid 90s and
as network engineers we hated to maintain a database of static IP
addresses for users,
I think you mean "a database of static IP addresses" DNS, not HOSTS.TXT.
Then, neither Novell nor AppleTalk enables it.
Today, with DNS dynamic update, you don't have to maintain the database
manually.
The difference is that DHCP with centralized state is a lot more
good at automatic maintenance of the database than so stateful
SLAAC with fully distributed state.
and we loved how AT for example was totally
automatic (IPX was in the middle because we also hated the long addresses).
So is most NAT boxes behaving as a DHCP server.
But any how, I agree with Brian that it was a good idea at that time.
Not at all.
It was merely that those who had little operational insight had
thought so.
Rest of the people developed DHCP and, now, you can see which is
better.
Masataka Ohta