Host autoconfiguration capabilities isn't a "rocket space" science, but
would certainly greatly help to accommodate the ability to change
providers in presence of hierarchical routing. Granted this wouldn't
address the problem of dealing with the installed based, but we are not
aware of any other alternative (except for the NAT boxes and/or
application layer gateway alternative) that wouldn't require *any*
changes to the installed base, while at the same time would accommodate
hierarchical routing and would allow to change providers.Noel Chiappa & Yakov Rekhter
Host autoconfiguration requires that DNS be rewritten as well, though, and
that's something that hasn't had much work done on it.
The implementation of this kind of thing MUST -- repeat -- MUST -- be
complete, or it won't get adopted. I could sell to people *right now* the
need and want to go to, for example, an integrated bootp/DNS style thing, IF
it was integrated all the way down to the level of plug and play.
Until it is, the manual configuration requirement is a problem -- and one
not easily solved.