Re: [PWE3] Mail regarding draft-ietf-pwe3-vccv-for-gal

[Alexander Vainshtein <[e-mail]>]

​Greg,

Lots of thanks for a very careful review of the document.

All your comments look valid to me and, IMO, should be addressed in the next revision of the draft.


In addition, please see below a couple of comments of my own:

  1.  GAL vs. Flow Label:
     *   The draft refers to RFC 5586 for the definition of GAL, and this document states that GAL MUST be BoS.
     *   At the same time, RFC 6391 has defined the Flow Label for flow-aware (a.k.a. "fat") PWs, and specified that it MUST be BoS.
     *   It is not clear to me whether GAL and Flow Label can be combined, since they cannot both be BoS. I'd like to remind the authors that this issue has been raised at the very early stages of discussion of VCCV Type 4 (even before it has become a WG document), but it remains unresolved until now.
  2.  TTL in the PW LSE:
     *   The draft contains some Editor remarks regarding this issue, but eventually suggests setting TTL=1 in the PW LSE for SS-PWs
     *   To the best of my recollection original Martini drafts have set the PW LSE TTL to 2, and many implementations follow this, even if the PW RFCs have relaxed that to any suitable value
     *   In any case, setting TTL in the PW LSE to 1 would cause many implementations to trap all PW packets to the CP due to TTL expiration; so this looks an error to me,


Hopefully these comments will be useful.

Regards,

Sasha

________________________________
From: pwe3 <[e-mail]> on behalf of Gregory Mirsky <[e-mail]>
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2014 4:30 AM
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]
Subject: [PWE3] Mail regarding draft-ietf-pwe3-vccv-for-gal

Dear Authors, Editors, et. al,
thank you for your work on this document that is very important to PW OAM. Please kindly consider my comments below:

•         Abstract

o   "This document describes a unified mode of operation for Virtual Circuit Connectivity Verification (VCCV) ..." IMHO, agreement of WG discussion in Paris was to limit document scope to introduction of Control Channel Type 4 for PW VCCV and address unified operation of CC VCCV in RFC 5085bis.

o   “It describes new rules requiring this mode to be used as the default/mandatory mode of operation for VCCV.” I think this statement is over-reaching. Use of Control Channel Type 4 may be suggested as preferred in some scenarios, such as CW not being used, SS-PW or e2e MS-PW. I think that the strongest statement could be “New implementations of PW VCCV SHOULD support CC Type 4.”

o   "The older types will remain optional." IMHO, the WG agreed to obsolete Type 2 CC PW VCCV.

•         Requirements Language and Terminology.
These acronyms are not used in the document: AVP, L2SS, LCCE, PW-ACH

•         Introduction

o   "... the ITU-T and IETF have set out to enhance MPLS to make it suitable as an optical transport protocol ..." Perhaps should be "packet transport".

o   "In order to support VCCV when an MPLS-TP PSN is in use, the GAL-ACH had to be created ..." G-ACh was created for MPLS-TP LSP, not PW. PW VCCV when PSN is MPLS-TP can use any of described in RFC 5085 control channel types. And RFC 5586 explicitly excluded GAL from being used on PWs in the first sentence of Section 4.2.

o   "This document defines two modes of operation of VCCV ..." Where the document leaves CC Type 3? Isn't it valid mode of PW VCCV operation that the PWE3 WG decided to keep? I believe that only Type 3 can be used in MS-PW to address S-PE whether CW  being used or not.

o   "In either case, it will be mandatory to implement and use that mode under that scenario." Again, this conclusion is not in sync with what was agreed at PWE3 WG meeting in Paris.

•         Section 2
"... Associated Channel Types of 21, 07, or 57 are allowed" Firstly, it should be "0x0021, 0x007, or 0x0057". Secondly, why 0x000A, 0x000B, 0x000C, 0x000D, 0x000E, 0x0022, 0x0023, 0x0024, 0x0025, 0x0026, 0x0027, and 0x0058 would not be listed as valid ACH types?

•         Section 3
"In the case of multi-segment pseudo-wires, the PW Label TTL MUST be set to the correct value to reach the intended destination PE as described in [RFC6073]" And that would be the case of VCCV CC Type 3 used in combination with CC Type 4. I think it must be so noted that VCCV CC Type 3 and CC Type 4 can be used in combination since Section 5.1.3 of RFC 5085 explicitly allows combination of PW VCCV Control Channels Type 1 and Type 3.

•         Section 4
"The first nibble of the next field is set to 0001b ..." Perhaps “the first nibble of the next octet …”. And does that imply that GAL MUST be BoS label and thus S=1? Should that be explicitly stated?

•         Section 5

o   “If the c-bit is set, indicating the use of the control word, type 1 MUST be advertised and type 4 MUST NOT be advertised.” MUST in connection to Type 1 implicitly requires support of CC Type 1. I think that this is too strong statement and propose change it to “Type 1 MUST be advertised if supported” or just “Type 1 MAY be advertised”.

o   "If the c-bit is not set, indicating that the control word is not in use, type 4 MUST be advertised, and type 1 MUST NOT be advertised." As in previous comment, MUST in connection to CC Type 4 is too strong and implies it being supported. Similar change suggested.

Regards,
                Greg