Quick answer:
bound@zk3.dec.com writes: Daniel,
Have you or someone from RIPE participated on the IPng mailing list?
Have you or someone from RIPE participated in the IPng WG meetings at the last three IETF meetings?
Yes we have. I personally have not been in Memphis, hoever none of us was able to be at the interim meeting. To my knowledge the draft under discussion was written less than two IETFs ago. I personally was not able to be at all IPnG meetings at the last few IETFs because of conflicts with other things. I have however voiced my concerns about this particular issue to Miek O'Dell while the discussion was going on. But all that is besides the point really.
The reason I ask is because we have done technical analysis on this and have had much discussion.
I have seen some of this discussion. I am afraid I have seen no documented discussion revealing the reasoning behind fixing the TLA length and fixing it at 13 bits. Frankly I have been surprised by the sudden speed of the provider based addressing standardisation. What I have voiced are concerns based on our experience with setting up and operating address space registries as well as providing coordination services to ISPs. My main point is that fixing the TLA length and fixing it at 13 bits has such far-reaching consequences that it needs to be supported by a solid technical argument which I cannot find in the drafts nor in any other source available to me. I think the draft should at least point to a solid reference supporting this. I expect a lot of entropy down the road if this is not supported well.
I think discussing the reason for going with a 13bit TLA needs to be brought out more and doing and checking that is prudent. But the architecture and reasoning has had many technical discussions. I would like to understand as a WG member if you or RIPE did not agree with the results (which I would think we would have heard before now) or if you or RIPE have not been part of these open public discussions. It could be we need to point to the mail archives and the GSE reasoning paper done by Thomas Narten, Lixia Zhang, et al from whence this essential proposal came from based on a WG meeting in Mountain View about a year ago? I am trying to understand if this is an educational effort on our part as a WG group?
It is both educational and principal. Major design decisions should be somewhat transparent to a wider audience. Standardising TLA length in fact puts significant constraints on operations, business models and address space allocation policies just to name a few issues. This needs to be justified somewhat more than just saying "it is standardised like this". The reasons have to be accessible more widely than just the IPnG WG. Note that I am not at issue with the underlying architecture. It is about fixing the boundary and fixing it at a particular value. If there is a solid technical reason for it, then document it. Documenting it will make the standard a stronger document and will prevent a lot of discussion about the repercussions. If there is no solid technical reason to do so then then do not fix these values. If a (proposed) standard does not document this reasoning or at least points to it, it is seriously flawed. This is not a definition of a type field in some application protocol header. It is much more critical. Does that answer your question? Daniel