[Int-area] Comments on draft-ietf-intarea-frag-fragile-06

[Tom Herbert <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

I have suggested text for the draft to address some previous comments
made on the list.

Last paragraph in section 4.3:

"This problem does not occur in stateful firewalls or Network Address
Translation (NAT) devices. Such devices maintain state so that they
can afford identical treatment to each fragment that belongs to a
packet. Note, however, that stateful firewalls and NAT devices impose
the external requirement that all packets of a flow and fragments of a
packets for a flow must traverse the same stateful device; stateless
devices do not force this requirement."

Section 4.5:
"IP fragmentation causes problems for some routers that support Equal
Cost Multipath (ECMP). Many routers that support ECMP execute the
algorithm described in Section 4.4 in order to perform flow based
forwarding; therefore, the exhibit they same problematic behaviors
described in Section 4.4. In IPv6, the flow label may alternatively
used as input to the algorithm as opposed to parsing the transport
layer of packets to discern port numbers. The flow label should be
consistently set for a packets of flow including fragments, such that
a device does not need to parse packets beyond the IP header for the
purposes of ECMP."

Add to section 7.3:

"Routers SHOULD use IPv6 flow label for ECMP routing as described in [RFC6438]."