Re: Last Call: <draft-bonica-special-purpose-03.txt> (Special-Purpose Address Registries) to Best Current Practice

[Ronald Bonica <[e-mail]>]

Geoff, Randy,

Having reflected on your comments, I think that the two of you may be approaching the same problem from two directions. I will try my best to articulate the problem. When we agree that we have a common understanding of the problem, we can decide whether to fix draft-bonica or abandon it.

Geoff points out that each of the entries mentioned in draft-bonica can be characterized as one of the following:

- a special purpose address assignment
- a address reservation

All compliant IP implementations must respect special purpose address assignments. As Randy puts it, special purpose address assignments should be baked into IP stacks. 

However, the same is not true of address reservations. While operators may afford special treatment to packets that are sourced from or destined to reserved addresses, these treatments should not be baked into IP implementations. They should be configurable.

Currently, there is nothing in draft-bonica that distinguishes between special purpose address assignments and address reservations. If we were to continue with this draft, we would have to add a field that makes this distinction. Having added that field, we should also make clear that that field, and only that field, determines whether an address should be baked into IP stacks?

Randy, Geoff, have I restated the problem accurately?


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Ron Bonica
vcard:       www.bonica.org/ron/ronbonica.vcf