Re: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-atlas-icmp-unnumbered-08

[Carlos Pignataro <[e-mail]>]

David,

Please find one additional comment response to your suggestion.

Excerpts from [e-mail] on 12/27/2009:
> I suggest adding a Section 3.3 to discuss use of ifIndex with ICMP and
> network management tools (e.g., enhanced traceroute plus an SNMP
> manager)

I still feel that discussing this use would be a strong distraction and
divertion, and not add substativeness to the spec, ultimatelly causing
confusion.

My traceroute app at home does IP address-to-name mapping, querying DNS
and reporting hostnames; ICMP timexceeded was not spec'ed that way, but
a 'traceroute + hostname manager querier' was useful. It also does:
      -A: Report AS# at each hop (from GRR)
      -O: Report owner at each hop (from DNS)

because it was useful, and reports TOS change, none of which was
including on the ICMP timeexceeded or unreachable definitions.

A public use of the ifIndex can be to see different interfaces in a
router, seeing ECMPs with unnumbered, and not mapping them to an
interface name with an SNMP manager. That is a degree of idenfication,
to know they are different.

Describing an app like you suggest would implicitly limit, I think. We
are not spec'ing an application, only the extensions of ICMP, and it
seems to me that there is enough contextual applicability and motivation
(without falling into over-framing and under-scoping).

Thanks,

-- Carlos.