Re: I-D ACTION:draft-jabley-ipv6-rh0-is-evil-00.txt

[David Malone <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 02:16:41PM +0200, Guillaume Valadon / ???????????? ???????????? wrote:
> Except some custom-made traceroute6 and KAME's implementation, I am  
> not aware of such usage of RH0. What I mean here, is that deprecating  
> RH0 won't harm anyone (except some reasearchers).
> Discovering the 'return path' is a really cool feature, but the  
> discussions during the last weeks proved that RH0 is not the right  
> solution. Its benefit is too small comparing to the problem related  
> to RH0.

IMHO, the existance of so many traceroute looking glasses is
significant evidence that operators (not just researchers) need
intermediate point traceroute. It is used by people to find routes
external to their network and to explore routes within their networks
(say big datacentre operators or big corporate networks). This
feature should be implementable in traceroute (where it seems to
belong) and not as a web/telnet application, which requires you to
have a cooperating server in each network you might want to trace
through.

This is why I think someone might want to turn RH0 back on again
(to get this feature on their own network). They can filter at the
border to prevent external abuse, and use the usual procedures to
deal with internal abuse. This is also the sort of feature that
ordinary users are not likely to use, which is why I think it is
reasonable to have it off by default.

I understand Itojun's suggestion that we can have a RH7 that will
allow useful source routing without the danger associated with RH0.
This sounds like a very good idea.  However, realistically, I suspect
that even if the RH7 standard was fully specified tomorrow, we would
be waiting more than two years to have it implemented in production
versions of software that operators are likely to be using.

	David.

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