[trill] Opsdir last call review of draft-ietf-trill-arp-optimization-08

[Mahesh Jethanandani <[e-mail]>]

Reviewer: Mahesh Jethanandani
Review result: Has Nits

I have reviewed this document as part of the Operational directorate’s ongoing
effort to review all IETF documents being processed by the IESG.
 These comments were written with the intent of improving the
operational aspects of the IETF drafts. Comments that are not addressed in last
call may be included in AD reviews during the IESG review.  Document editors
and WG chairs should treat these comments just like any other last
call comments.

Document reviewed:  draft-ietf-trill-arp-optimization-08

Summary: Ready with Nits

Document Status: Standard Track

General Comments: The abstract of the document says that the draft tries “To
reduce the burden on a TRILL campus caused by these multi-destination messages,
RBridges MAY implement an "optimized ARP/ND response", as specified herein,
when the target's location is known by the ingress RBridge or can be obtained
from a directory. This avoids ARP/ND query and answer flooding.” Implementation
of this draft will impact the operations of the network. As such careful
consideration should be placed on operational and management impact of the
draft.

The following comments look at the document both from an operational
perspective as well as a management perspective.

Operational Considerations:

Operational considerations include installation and initial setup, migration
path, requirements on other protocols, impact on network operations and
verification of correct operation.

>From an impact on network operations perspective, this draft proposes to reduce
the traffic in the network by preventing a network wide broadcast and multicast
of messages. As such it should reduce the impact on the network, when operating
correctly. In the worst case, that it is not operating or operating
incorrectly, these network broadcast and multicast messages will “leak” into
the broader network, where they will be treated just as they are in todays
network. For this reason, a migration path may not be required, or existing
protocols modified to deal with the change.

>From a verification of correct operations, it is not clear how one determines
that the RBridge is operating correctly beyond observing individual ARP/ND
messages. Does it keep track of ARP/ND messages it has intercepted and
responded to on the local network, which would have escaped to the broader
network? Keeping track of statistics will allow for tracking the operation of
what is defined in the draft.

Management Considerations:

Management considerations include interoperability, fault management,
configuration management, accounting, performance and security.

>From a configuration management perspective, it is not clear how the
configuration of the RBridge is realized. For example, per the draft, RBridge
might not verify an IP address if the network manager's policy is to have the
network behave, for each Data Label, as if it were a single link and just
believe an ARP/ND it receives. If such a configuration is desired, this or an
accompanying document needs to define the manageability aspect of RBridge,
preferably in the form of a YANG model.

>From a accounting perspective, For example, in the draft, RBridge could for
generic ARP/ND request seeking the MAC address corresponding to an IP address,
if the edge RBridge knows the IP address and corresponding MAC, behavior is as
in item (a), otherwise behavior is as in item (b). Behavior for gratuitous ARP
and ND Unsolicited Neighbor Advertisements [RFC4861] is given in item (c). And
item (d) covers handling of Address Probe ARP Query. Are there specific
statistics being maintained for each of these options? Keeping track of
individual options allows for capacity management and planning.

A run of idnits revealed a few warnings:

Miscellaneous warnings:
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

  == Line 99 has weird spacing: '...enience  along...'

  -- The document date (April 17, 2017) is 79 days in the past.  Is this
     intentional?

  Checking references for intended status: Proposed Standard
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

     (See RFCs 3967 and 4897 for information about using normative references
     to lower-maturity documents in RFCs)

  == Missing Reference: 'IA-draft' is mentioned on line 390, but not defined

  == Unused Reference: 'RFC7356' is defined on line 540, but no explicit
     reference was found in the text

  == Outdated reference: draft-ietf-trill-directory-assist-mechanisms has
     been published as RFC 8171

     Summary: 0 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 4 warnings (==), 1 comment (--).

     Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information about
     the items above.

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