[lisp] On the use of priority associated to RLOCs

[Luigi Iannone <[e-mail]>]

Hi All,


TL;DR: Should the priority associated to RLOCs be used to indicate something else?

Long Version:

As you may (or may not) know Dino submitted the lispers.net <http://lispers.net/> NAT traversal solution (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-farinacci-lisp-lispers-net-nat/ ) for publication on the Independent Stream (https://www.rfc-editor.org/about/independent/).

Current ISE Editor is Eliot Lear (well known by old lispers like me ;-) )

During the review of the document an interesting question came up:

Lispers.net <http://lispers.net/> NAT traversal uses priority 254 to indicate that the RLOC belongs to a RTR.

No text in old and new specs suggest a usage of the priority to deliver something different than the priority itself.
Even the value 255 is related to priority: do not use this RLOC = no priority.

It goes without saying that there is no IANA registry about special value of priority associated to RLOCs.

At the same time there is no text that explicitly states “priority indicates only the priority and CANNOT be used for something else”.

So the question is: Should we (the WG) consider that priorities can be used to indicate something different from priority?

If not: we may want to write it down somewhere.

If yes: Well…. This deserves a longer discussion (may be to be included in the new charter…).

Thoughts ?

Ciao

Luigi