Re: Eric Rescorla's No Objection on draft-ietf-6man-rfc6434-bis-08: (with COMMENT)

Hi Eric,

Thanks for the review, we updated several lower case should/must to upper
case when it made sense.

Also addressed most of the Nits, so thanks for the comments.

~Tim

On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 11:54 PM Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 8:49 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
> brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 04/07/2018 11:19, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>> ....
>> > S 5.1.
>> >>      field as defined in the IPv6 Flow Label specification [RFC6437].
>> >>      Forwarding nodes such as routers and load distributors MUST NOT
>> >>      depend only on Flow Label values being uniformly distributed.  It
>> is
>> >>      RECOMMENDED that source hosts support the flow label by setting
>> the
>> >>      Flow Label field for all packets of a given flow to the same value
>> >>      chosen from an approximation to a discrete uniform distribution.
>> >
>> > Is there a reason you are using "approximation" here?
>> >
>>
>> RFC6437 says:
>>
>>    In statistics, a discrete uniform distribution is defined as a
>>    probability distribution in which each value in a given range of
>>    equally spaced values (such as a sequence of integers) is equally
>>    likely to be chosen as the next value.  The values in such a
>>    distribution exhibit both variability and unguessability.  Thus, as
>>    specified in Section 3, an approximation to a discrete uniform
>>    distribution is preferable as the source of flow label values.
>>    Intentionally, there are no precise mathematical requirements placed
>>    on the distribution or the method used to achieve such a
>>    distribution.
>>
>> [and in Section 3]
>>
>>    It is therefore RECOMMENDED
>>    that source hosts support the flow label by setting the flow label
>>    field for all packets of a given flow to the same value chosen from
>>    an approximation to a discrete uniform distribution.  Both stateful
>>    and stateless methods of assigning a value could be used, but it is
>>    outside the scope of this specification to mandate an algorithm.
>>
>> The reason for saying "approximate" is basically that at least one
>> mathematician (my colleague Prof. Cristian Calude) pointed out that
>> (apart from quantum processes) there is no way to generate a truly
>> random distribution. So you can regard it as mathematical pedantry;
>> I have no strong feelings whether that's useful in the present draft.
>>
>
> Yeah, I tend to think "approximate" is a bit nitpicky here, but this is a
> comment, so I leave it to the author to deal with it as they see fit.
>
> -Ekr
>
>
>>    Brian
>>
>
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