[Anima] PEN v domain name [GRASP open issues confirmation]

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

>> o2) Private Enterprise Number(PEN) is used to distinguish vendor options. Would a domain name be better?
>> Consensus: PEN might not make sense for autonomic nodes; domain name might be better.

The point here is that some GRASP objectives will be standardised and their
names will be in an IANA registry; they don't need either a PEN or a domain name.

Other objectives will be non-standardised; we call them "vendor" options but of
course they could be private in any way, open-source, or whatever. However, to
make them unique, they need some tag that is guaranteed to be unique, which means
we need to pick something that is registered somewhere. The two obvious choices
are PEN numbers or domain names.

PEN numbers (draft-liang-iana-pen) are fixed length (32 bit) integers introduced
for SNMP (but with no dependency on SNMP), allocated FCFS at no cost. This morning,
there are 46768 of them allocated.

Domain names are variable length strings. They cost money to obtain and maintain.
They can vanish or be re-assigned.

>From a GRASP efficiency point of view, I think that 32 bit integers are marginally
better.

Regards
   Brian