I-D Action:draft-azinger-scalable-addressing-00.txt

[David Conrad]

Fred,

On Sep 26, 2010, at 1:27 AM, Fred Baker wrote:
> So the complaint is that the IETF has not found a cure for human stupidity/laziness or for the need to configure routers?

This is somewhat beside the point as the die has already been cast, but I believe you are unfairly glossing over some of the difficulties implicit in the choice to bind the locator and identifier into the same object.  For example, the fact that transport-layer connections must be terminated when changing network topologic location means that it is impossible to maintain connection over those network change events.  This has nothing to do with human stupidity/laziness.

> Or is there another complaint?

I believe the original complaint was that some folks in the IETF have in the past ignored operators' input and the current draft appears to be repeating that pattern.

The fact that renumbering remains challenging is a symptom.  Apologies that my terseness in my response was insufficient to get my point across. Lesson learned.

> I'm serious. If the IETF has actively gotten in the way, there's something we need to fix.

The IETF frequently gets in the way, specifically when vocal participants in IETF working groups believe that some architectural construct is being violated (see NAT, DNS redirection, private addressing, CIDR back in the day, etc), however I suspect this isn't the thread to explore this particular generic issue.

In this specific case, several people including myself have argued that in the area of address allocation policy (or architecture, if you prefer), the IETF has in the past published documents that have tried to block PI allocation to end users without providing a reasonable (from the end users' perspective) alternative.  I fully understand the underlying rationale for these attempts and I even agree conceptually with the intent, but pragmatically speaking, I don't see the IETF having a whole lot of say in the matter.

> If it's something that neither the operators nor the IETF can solve, that's an unfair response.

As has been demonstrated many times in the past, the market and network operators will do whatever is necessary to meet a particular business need, regardless of whether there is a violation of architectural purity.  If the IETF is unable to come up with a realistic solution, network operators and the market will (perhaps in a way that has negative consequences, see NAT, DNS redirection, private addressing, CIDR, etc).

Simple declaring PI evil (even with detailed explanations) isn't going to get anyone anywhere.

Regards,
-drc