nanog mailing list archives

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


From: Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:21:09 -0700


On Jul 11, 2011, at 3:37 PM, William Herrin wrote:

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com> wrote:

On Jul 11, 2011, at 12:18 PM, William Herrin wrote:

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:20 AM, Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com> wrote:
On Jul 11, 2011, at 8:13 AM, William Herrin wrote:
Today's RFC candidates are required to call out IANA considerations
and security considerations in special sections. They do so because
each of these areas has landmines that the majority of working groups
are ill equipped to consider on their own.

There should be an operations callout as well -- a section where
proposed operations defaults (as well as statics for which a solid
case can be made for an operations tunable) are extracted from the
thick of it and offered for operator scrutiny prior to publication of
the RFC.

Do you find this adjustment objectionable?

Do I think that adding yet another required section to an
internet draft is going to increase it's quality?
No I do not.

Joel,

You may be right. Calling out IANA considerations doesn't seem to have
made the IETF any smarter on the shared ISP IPv4 space. And I have no
idea if calling out security implications has helped reduce
security-related design flaws.

On the other hand, calling out ops issues in RFCs is a modest reform
that at worst shouldn't hurt anything.

To my mind, one of the really good criterion for an operational
considerations document is some actual experience running it.

Hi Joel,

I'm not looking for anything that sophisticated. I just want a list of
"These are the things that can be tuned at an operations level (plus
the defaults) and these are the things that can't be tuned but someone
in the discussion thought a reasonable person might want them to be."
The idea is that an ops guy should be able to read the three-paragraph
intro, jump to the list of tunables and then be able to offer feedback
along the lines of, "Whoa! Of course X should be tunable, are you
kidding? Here's a rough description of where I want to configure it."
and "I'm never going to alter Y. You can make it configurable, but I'd
just as soon deal with everybody having the same value of Y."

Heck, make it multiple choice. 1 is "no chance I'll ever want to
change this value" and 5 is "I'll want to set this value case by
case."


That beats my next best idea:
asking the ops area to schedule its meetings with the various NOG
meetings instead of with the rest of the IETF so that the attendance
is ops who dabble in development instead of developers who dabble in
ops.

The OPS area works on OPS and Management. Protocol
development of the sort you're describing generally occurs
in working-groups chartered in the Internet or Routing areas...

A moment ago you said, the ops area "reviews basically every draft in
front of the IESG."

I said there is an ops directorate that reviews basically every draft in front of the iesg... much like their are 
genart reviews, security reviews iana reviews etc. The principle work on a draft by the time that occurs is already 
done unless the iesg returns the draft to the work group.

<SNIP>

Participants, especially those that actually do the work are the
important part as far as I'm concerned.

My focus in this thread is this: how do we help the next teams avoid
the discourtesy and the smackdown that the v6 teams are getting for
not adequately recognizing the ops' issues. These guys should have
been heroes but instead they screwed the pooch and everybody's paying
for it. How do we fix the systemic problems so that next time they are
heroes?

IPNG was a long time ago. things have changed and will continue to change because standards are written by humans and 
cemented with consensus which is imperment and changable. Rational changes, Requirements change and things should 
evolve, that's not failure it's healthy.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



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