Subject: [Int-area] FW: Last Call: draft-arkko-rfc2780-proto-update (IANA Allocation Guidelines for the Protocol Field) to BCP

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2007 10:46:04 +0200

FYI -- comments appreciated.

The IESG wrote:
> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
> the following document:
>
> - 'IANA Allocation Guidelines for the Protocol Field '
>    <draft-arkko-rfc2780-proto-update-00.txt> as a BCP
>
> The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
> final comments on this action.  Please send substantive comments to the
> [email-masked] mailing lists by 2007-12-03. Exceptionally, 
> comments may be sent to [email-masked] instead. In either case, please 
> retain the beginning of the Subject line to allow automated sorting.
>
> The file can be obtained via
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-arkko-rfc2780-proto-update-00.txt
>
>
> IESG discussion can be tracked via
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/public/pidtracker.cgi?command=view_id&dTag=16537&rfc_flag=0
>
>
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From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2007 15:52:23 -0500 (EST)

> From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>

    > comments appreciated.

Looks reasonable.

BTW, on the subject of protocol numbers, for another project (interoperable
upgrade to add EID's to TCP4), I once proposed adding an "end-end options"
protocol to the IPv4 base protocol set; i.e. a protocol that did nothing but
carry data from another protocol inside it (the number for that protocol
would be carried in the E2EO protocol header), along with a bunch of end-end
qoptions. Since they weren't in the IPv4 header, routers wouldn't look at
them, and it wouldn't slow down processing of those packets in the middle of
the network.

The reason I mention this is that while I was at it, I upped the size of the
"protocol carried inside this packet" field to 16 bits; I figured 2^16
protocols should probably last us a good long while. The bottom 2^8 would be
the same as the existing allocations.

With nearly 2^16 available, we could afford to be pretty cavalier about
handing out the ones that were larger than 2^8; we could pretty much have an
"if there's a document that describes it, you can have a number" policy for
that part of the number space. Which would be really nice - it would encourage
experimentation with new concepts.

	Noel