Re: draft-wang-6man-flow-label-reflection

[Jeroen Massar <[e-mail]>]

On 2014-11-18 07:33, Mark ZZZ Smith wrote:
[..]
>> In message <[e-mail]>, Jeroen Massar writes:
>>>  Why do we need a Flow Label then?
>>>
>>>  Please note that a five-tuple is perfectly fine for making up a random
>>>  id so that one "only has to do deep analysis work once". This is 
>> what
>>>  people have been using for as long a they have been doing this kind of 
>>>  work.
>>
>> And it doesn't work with IPv4 either.  Fragmented IPv4 traffic also
>> fails to be correctly forwarded by load balancers which look at TCP
>> and UDP ports.
>>
>> Just because it works "most of the time" doesn't mean that it 
>> isn't
>> broken.
>>
> 
> And layer 2 load balancing i.e. LAG also fails for either fragments
> or when the transport layer protocol isn't TCP or UDP.

Another thing that we really need to deprecate: IPv6 fragments.

Why are:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bonica-6man-frag-deprecate/
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-taylor-v6ops-fragdrop/

not active or already an RFC?

> Encoding flow information in the flow label overcomes that issue too.

But that is the thing: the Flow Label is a random number.

Entities that do not want to be tracked will set it to 0 or randomize it
per packet.

There is thus no "information" in that field: it is random.

Greets,
 Jeroen