Subject: RE: apps people?

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 11:25:56 -0700

> The few self-described apps people I've seen take
> a stand have to my recollection been strongly
> against dealing with locally scoped addresses .

Let's be clear. Our group (Windows Networking) has received a lot of feedback from developers of applications on the Windows platform. The negative developers' feedback was mostly centered on the difficulty of identifying the scope of an address, specially when a node is connected to several sites (e.g. home network and VPN to the corporate network), or when a node moves from site to site. Since the scope is not indicated in the address itself, applications have to keep track of a "site identifier" of some kind. The bottom line is that ambiguity hurts. The local scope nature also hurts, but not quite as much; it is another case of limited connectivity, which is a common "feature" in many networks.
 
-- Christian Huitema

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From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 11:32:45 -0700 (PDT)

Christian Huitema writes:
 > Let's be clear. Our group (Windows Networking) has received a lot
of feedback from developers of applications on the Windows
platform. The negative developers' feedback was mostly centered on the
difficulty of identifying the scope of an address, specially when a
node is connected to several sites (e.g. home network and VPN to the
corporate network), or when a node moves from site to site.

  Which is to say, topology information which it didn't
  have to consider in the past and for which it has little
  information at its disposal from which to make decisions.

  Do you mean to imply that their negative feedback is
  overblown? Because requiring hosts to be topology aware
  seems like Pandora's box to me, and they have good reason
  to be uneasy about where this is leading.

	Mike

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From: Tim Chown <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Aug 2003 11:48:36 +0100

> Let's be clear. Our group (Windows Networking) has received a lot of feedback from developers of applications on the Windows platform. The negative developers' feedback was mostly centered on the d…

Change the flow label to scope label, and get those bits in use ;-)

Tim