Re: 6MAN WG Last Call: draft-ietf-6man-predictable-fragment-id-01

[Fernando Gont <[e-mail]>]

Hi, Brian,

On 12/10/2014 09:36 AM, Brian Haberman wrote:
>> 
>> 1) In the same way we do for RFC6528 or RFC6056
>> 
>> 2) With something similar to 
>> (<http://www.si6networks.com/tools/ipv6toolkit>):
>> 
>> # frag6 -d TARGET --frag-id-poliy
> 
> That didn't answer the question.  In order to advance something on
> the standards track, there needs to be at least two interoperable 
> implementations.  How an implementation initializes a field like
> the fragment ID, TCP sequence number, or ephemeral port number has
> no affect on interoperability.
> 
> What you are describing in those documents is implementation
> guidance, not a protocol specification.  Given that, I would
> suggest that this document strike any normative text, drop the
> Updates tag, and move to Informational.

I personally have no issues with proceeding as indicated.

That said, I'm not sure I follow what you say above. This document has
a requirement that the IP ID must not be predictable, and
implementation advice on how to achieve that. The current status of
the ID is std track for the former, not for the later. As far as this
document is concerned, RFC2460 could already be advanced on the
stndards track, since there are at least four different and
interoperable implementations: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and OpenSolaris.

While the (un)predicatability of the IP ID certainly does not affect
interoperability, I guess the same applies to lots of other specs
related to security (for instance, the choice of accepting a
non-authenticated packet/chunk_of_data when authentication mechanisms
are place probably does not affect interoperability.... yet we have
plenty of these (for obvious reasons) in the corresponding specs).

That said, and as noted above, I have no issues with proceeding as you
suggested if that's deemed as the right way to go.

Thanks!

Cheers,
-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [e-mail]
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