Re: draft-pillay-esnault-ospf-flooding-05.txt

[Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>]

i would like to get out of the role of smtp relay and anonymizer.
be nice to pekka who has been uncloaked without warning.

randy

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From: Pekka Savola <pekkas@netcore.fi>
To: Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
Subject: Re: draft-pillay-esnault-ospf-flooding-05.txt
Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 08:29:01 +0300 (EEST)

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Randy Bush wrote:
> > * DC circuits spec is from 1995; they are practically dead/useless today, 
> >who cares about the feature?  They're junk in the spec.
> 
> Ok, you don't need 1793 for its original purpose, that's fine.
> 
> > * Now, this spec creates a dependency on DC circuit spec; this is useless 
> >if DC circuit spec is not implemented in all OSPF routers
> 
> Well, most OSPF extensions are useless if the extension isn't implemented
> in all OSPF routers.  If vendors want to offer this ability they can
> implement 1793 for this purpose, even though they don't need to implement
> it for its original purpose.

My main argument with these two is, the ospf-flooding draft is rather 
short, "seems-like-simple".  But to be useful, you suddenly have to 
implement and _support_ RFC1793 too (32 pages).. for a purpose it wasn't 
originally meant to be.

So, it appears this draft describes a hack which could be used to reduce
the amount of flooding (it's questionable whether this is a real problem).

If flooding is really considered to be a problem, my argument would be 
that one needs to at least consider why re-using RFC1793 for this specific 
purpose is the *right* approach.  I'm not really sure of that, but sounds 
like a spec abuse (and who knows how many assumptions in RFC1793 may 
become invalid when it's applied to a scenario it wasn't meant for?)

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings