RE: [midcom] More on new work item

I totally agree with Jonathan's position on the scope of DHCP as
outlined below. 

Either way though, IMHO, MIDCOM does not appear to be useful for
anything other than a carrier deployment or in a large enterprise
deployment that controls all aspects of a MIDCOM deployment, just from a
business/security policy perspective. I say this due to the very points
brought up in Jonathans last sentence WRT configuring the NAT IP.

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: midcom-admin@ietf.org [mailto:midcom-admin@ietf.org] On Behalf Of
Jonathan Rosenberg
Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 3:47 PM
To: Melinda Shore
Cc: midcom@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [midcom] More on new work item

I'm not sure we should take on these work items. My concerns are mostly 
practical.

I think we agree that DHCP applicability is only in very, very limited 
topologies - only in simple stub networks where an end user client would

normally directly talk to a nat. This would really be limited to 
consumers with home nats, or to enterprises. I think its unlikely that 
an enterprise would actually allow end clients to control the nat, due 
to the serious potential for abuse (imagine a virus infecting a PC, 
causing it to ask the middlebox to open all ports to all addresses). As 
such, I dont think this is workable in enterprise.

That leaves home NAT. However, do we think that manufacturers of such 
devices are likely to support midcom? I'd like to hear from one on this 
list. If not, this work item would be useful only in theory. Even if 
they did, how would we expect the clients to be configured with the 
security credentials needed to exercise midcom control over their nat? 
If such information is manually configured into the client, why can't 
you manually configure the IP of the home NAT as well?

Thanks,
Jonathan R.

Melinda Shore wrote:

> There's been no feedback on the proposed charter change, which
concerns
> me.  I hope that people will speak up regardless of whether they think
> the proposed work item is a good idea or a bad idea.
> 
> I don't think getting the work done would be an issue - there are
> always people willing to author documents.  However, getting people
> to *review* documents is far more difficult, and I don't think we can
> allow work to go forward if we don't have a reasonable expectation
> that people with subject area expertise - in this case, the midcom
> working group - are willing to take the time to provide expert review
> as the document is progressed.  I don't want to make any assumptions
> about what the lack of feedback means, so even a simple "yes" or "no"
> on the proposed work item would be much appreciated.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Melinda
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> midcom@ietf.org
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/midcom
> 

-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                600 Lanidex Plaza
Chief Technology Officer                    Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
dynamicsoft
jdrosen@dynamicsoft.com                     FAX:   (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net                      PHONE: (973) 952-5000
http://www.dynamicsoft.com

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