Re: draft-duke-quic-load-balancers-05.txt

[Sowmini Varadhan <[e-mail]>]

On (10/29/19 13:25), Martin Duke wrote:
>    Hi Sowmini,
>    Thanks for the review. I'll file a PR for your editorial changes.

sounds good, thanks for doing this!

>    0b11 is 2 bits. The '0b' notation indicates each digit is a bit; '0x'
>    would be hexadecimal, where 2 characters = 1 Bytes.

ah, this is the NIC data-sheet notation, that got me by surprise.
If there is no strong objection, can we just list the code-points
as "11" (I think this is the convention followed in other ietf rfcs,
e.g., 3168, for the ECT code-points). 

>    In section 4, it says: " The load balancer SHOULD route Initial and 0-RTT
>    packets from the client using an alternate algorithm". The point here is
>    that the destination CID for these packets is chosen by the client. It may
>    not be long enough to apply the chosen algorithm, so something else should
>    be done. However, " This algorithm SHOULD generate consistent results for
>    Initial and 0RTT packets that arrive with the same source and destination
>    connection ID" so they all end up at the same place. If the LB doesn't do
>    this, then the 0RTT packets will be lost. This is suboptimal but doesn't
>    break the protocol.

ok, perhaps it would be helpful to add some discussion around this
in the draft.

[discussion for "Section 4.3.1 refers to "token"]
>    This is the QUIC-LB authentication token, which I should clarify. In any
>    case, I don't believe that servers get this token if there's out-of-band
>    configuration, so I need to fix this.

Ok.

[discussion around Section 5]
>    This is for the benefit of the QUIC server. When the server gets an
>    Initial Packet with a Retry token in it, it needs to extract the ODCID
>    from that token so that it can send it back in a transport parameter. If
>    the client got a Retry but then doesn't get the ODCID transport parameter,
>    it means there's an unauthorized man in the middle and the client should
>    terminate the connection.

I see. In general, it would help to provide some context in this section 
about why any tweaks in the Retry Service are needed at all, along with 
your explanation above.

Thanks!

--Sowmini