Re: requirements draft revision

[Joe Abley <jabley-ietf@automagic.org>]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 07:09:36PM -0500, Jon (Taz) Mischo wrote:
> You mean administrative domain.  We call them networks, but you can call
> it an administrative domain.  That means a portion of a network controlled
> by the same body.
> 
> Mind you, everyone will just say, "Oh, you mean a network."  I find it
> amusing that you're trying very hard to define something while avoiding
> defining it as what it is.  It's like trying to describe a McIntosh apple
> while avoiding calling in an apple entirely, and avoiding any correlation
> to an apple.

We could call it a site, a network, an enterprise, a provider, a
subscriber, an autonomous system, a domain, an area, an organisation,
a node, a backbone, and probably lots of other things. All those terms
are heavily overloaded ("network", arguably, more than most).

The reason for choosing "enterprise" was that there was an existing
definition in RFC1918 that seemed to fit. I called it an "autonomous
system" to start with, and the reaction to that was that we needed to
drop the routing connotation. I'm not avoiding "network" for any
particular reason, although that's not what I'd call it in general
conversation.

I really don't think it matters what we call it, as long as we know what
we mean. If we call it a "network", we still have to define what we mean
by that in this context. "Enterprise" doesn't seem like such a bad name
to me, but like I say, I don't really care what we use :)


Joe