Re: draft-ietf-ipv6-ula-central-02.txt

Thus spake "Roger Jorgensen" <rogerj@jorgensen.no>
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2007, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
>> This has been a longstanding problem in the IETF; in fact,
>> the inability to agree on what "site" means was one of the
>> reasons SLAs were deprecated.  The word "site" is often
>> abused to mean "administrative domain" rather than "physical location" 
>> due to the ISP-centric nature of the IETF
>> and RIRs. It's virtually impossible to tell, in any particular
>> context, which meaning an author meant.  We need to stop
>> using the word entirely...
>
> why does it mather if it is physical site, administrative domain
> (eh how can anyone interprent that as a site?!) or a room,
> company etc... why not leave that upto those that try to use it?

It matters because there are a lot of protocol and policy documents that 
refer to "sites".  For instance, one of the current qualifications for 
getting an IPv6 LIR allocation require that one have a plan to make 
assignments to 200 "sites".  Obviously the meaning of that is significantly 
changed depending on whether you consider a single company with 200+ 
locations sharing a single uplink to be one "site" or 200+ "sites".

Also, in the case of SLAs, the utility of the addresses is impacted greatly 
by whether you consider a "site" to be a single administrative domain, where 
there would not be internal collisions, vs. considering each distinct 
location to be a "site", which could lead to hundreds or thousands of 
internal collisions.

As far as why "site" has been abused to mean "administrative domain", that 
comes from the IETF and RIRs being very ISP-centric, as I said; a single 
downstream connection denotes a single "site" regardless of how complex the 
internal network behind it is or how many other locations it serves.  Or 
maybe it doesn't, depending on who's talking; that's the problem.

S

Stephen Sprunk      "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723         are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS                                             --Isaac Asimov 

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