ip6mode=autohost

[Havard Eidnes <he%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hi,

I'm Håvard, and I like tilting at windmills! :)

Is there anyone else out there who thinks that this particular
part is a disaster from the perspective of admin usability when
transitioning from 9.x to newer, promotion of the use of IPv6,
and backward compatibility, something I used to think we prided
ourselves in?

On a host running 11.0, /etc/rc.d/network contains:

        autohost)
                if ! checkyesno dhcpcd; then
                        warn "rtsol and kernel ra handling have been removed"
                        warn "please configure dhcpcd in its place."
                fi
                ;;

ip6mode=autohost doesn't really mean "use rtsol and the kernel RA
handling", it means "please use whatever method to dynamically
assign me an IPv6 address and an IPv6 default route".

But instead, here we have the conputer simply saying "no, I will
not honor your configured desire for getting a dynamic IPv6
address and a default route" with essentially no immediately
useful hints other than pointing to dhcpcd, which has a 579 line
man page and which does a lot of other things than "getting a
working IPv6 client setup".  This is a gross violation of the
KISS principle, and IMO on the verge of being IPv6-hostile.

Googling a bit (this is cheating, we should provide the required
assistance directly "out of the box" without creating too much
friction at any point) leads me to visit

   https://www.netbsd.org/docs/network/ipv6/

which ... is a lot of words.  BTW, has this been updated to the
reality after we now require dhcpcd for automatic address
assignment?

But, yes, explicitly searching for "dhcp" on that page leads me
to

ip6mode="autohost"
dhcpcd="YES"
dhcpcd_flags="-6"

(yes, I have a static IPv4 address.)

It also, however, says

For the 2nd line, alternatively, you can use /etc/ifconfig.{IF}, like below:

    up

Wait, what?  No dhcpcd="YES" required?

This all seems to confuse me even more.

Can we please do better?

I think I'm going with a ip6mode=host setup, there it's at least
reasonably easy to control all the moving parts.

Regards,

- Håvard