[arin-ppml] Draft Policy 2011-5: Shared Transition Space for IPv4 Address Extension - IAB comment

[William Herrin]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
> On 6/28/2011 10:08 AM, William Herrin wrote:
>> IETF v6ops could also use some help on the web side. This is a UTF-8
>> document with unix end of lines being sent as text/plain with no
>> charset. Unless the browser violates standards and makes a guess about
>> what sort of document was sent, it comes up unreadable.
>
> It displays fine in Internet Explorer.  You can also right-click and
> save it to a directory and use vi to read it.

And it doesn't in Firefox. If nobody tried to guess, if everybody
rendered it as instructed, then the person who posted the document
would have immediately realized the mistake -- and fixed it. Instead
we have random brokenness.

Just like with Joel's assumption that a non-RFC1918 IP address means
global reachability.


>> Which is ironic since we're talking about protocols making (poor)
>> guesses about what they can do depending on the assigned IP address.
>
> Ironic but not surprising.  I used to admin at a software development
> company that wrote networking software that ran on UNIX but the programmers
> had absolutely no understanding of how a UNIX system was administered.
>
> Everyone has their specialties.  Few ever raise their eyes to look
> beyond them.  Have you ever replaced the fuel filter in your car?

No, but I've changed a power steering pump. Mostly, I take the car in
for service and ask the technician to explain his recommendations.
Unless something raises a red flag for me, I then follow the
recommendation because those are the guys who know.

Which is also relevant here - RIRs like ARIN are the centers of
knowledge for operational addressing needs. While the IETF is
certainly the right organization to work out the technical details of
a shared address space, the protocol level musts and must nots,
they're a poor choice of organization to determine -whether- there's
an operational need for an address space with 2011-5's parameters or
-how much- address space should be dedicated to it. They don't draw
those experts. We do.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004