Re: Anybody can participate in the IETF (Was: Why is IPv6 broken?)

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 3:41 PM, Jeff Wheeler <jsw () inconcepts biz> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 3:18 PM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:
> > On the other hand, calling out ops issues in RFCs is a modest reform
> > that at worst shouldn't hurt anything. That beats my next best idea:
>
> I think if this were done, some guy like me would spend endless hours
> arguing with others about what should and should not be documented in
> this proposed section, without it actually benefiting the process or
> the improving the underlying protocol function / specification.  Let
> me give you an example:
>
> BGP Messages, which are up to 4KB, need to be expanded to support
> future features like as-path signing.  Randy Bush proposes to extend
> them to 65,535 octets, the maximum size without significantly changing
> the message header.  This raises a few concerns which I label as
> operational, for example, off-by-one bugs in code can fail to be
> detected by a neighboring BGP speaker in some circumstances, because
> an age-old (since BGP 1) idiot check in the protocol is being silently
> removed.
>
> If you ask me, that is operational and belongs in such a section.

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your thoughtful response. Question: It seems to me like
figuring out what is or isn't a security issue to be called out has
exactly the same pitfalls. How do you deal with it?


> Besides, you want "IETF people" who are claimed not to understand
> operational problems to figure them out and document them in the RFCs?
>  I do not think this will be helpful.  More hands-on operators
> participating in their process is what is needed.

You're an "IETF person" trying to figure out what is or isn't an
operations issue so that you can call it out. How might you go about
figuring that out?

Personally, I might ask a few ops: "Lend me your ear for three minutes
to tell you about what I'm working on. Now that that I've given you
the pitch, is this something you'd like to control in a configuration
or is it something you want to -just work-?" "Control" = operations
issue. "Just work" = not an operations issue.

Regards,
Bill

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
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