Re: [Idr] new draft - reservation of two already reserved ASNs

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 09:02:13AM -0400, Jon Mitchell wrote:
> During the private asn draft process, several times it was recommended
> that proper documentation of the EXISTING reservations for 65535 and
> 4294967295 be done, so have posted a draft to try and rectify that.
> Wanted to get some initial feedback on this draft and add any
> additional reasoning the group has for these reservations before
> asking for WG acceptance.

Also, to seed/head off some of the discussion, the justifications in the
draft are easy to see as thin in some cases.  IMO, we're looking for
something that will look historically reasonable but beyond that IANA would
rather just have something that says "this doc says they're reserved".
Matter of fact, we could simply publish the document and say "they're
reserved" and be done with it.

Historically, 65535 had been problematic for some implementations.  Most of
the reason for this to have been problematic was simply bad code and the
correspondence of the value with UINT16_MAX/-1 signed int16.  One would
hope that all such bugs have been banished from the Internet by now. :-)

The extension of such thin reasoning to UINT32_MAX is less because bugs have
been observed using this value and more from the (these days) typical
process of tending to reserve the top and/or bottom code points as magic
values for "future extensions".  Sometimes such values are never used,
sometimes they are.

It is, of course, the WG's prerogative to pick whatever justification it
would like in such a document.  Let us know what text you'd like. :-)

-- Jeff