Subject: [homenet] Prefix semantics (not) [was: DHCP PD]

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 15:42:01 -0500

On 6th February 2014, Brian Carpenter said, in part:
> We designed diffserv for this purpose and it works well 
> and is quite widely used in corporate networks. 

Yes.  

Purely as an example, one of my clients is using the IP ToS/DSCP 
byte to distinguish between various kinds of traffic inside
their large enterprise network.  It works well for them.

I also will note that some existing low-cost "consumer" router/switch
products for sale off-the-shelf (in multiple countries on various 
continents) already include support for DiffServ/IP-ToS.  As near
as I can tell, this has been true for at least 5 years now.  So
some folks' residential in-home networks might already support
DiffServ/IP-ToS without any home user configuration needed.

> Wasting prefixes to distinguish traffic types is an incredibly bad idea.

I could not agree more with that sentence just above.  

Wasting prefixes is a terribly dangerous idea.  The IETF really 
OUGHT NOT (emphasis intentional) endorse, support, or approve of 
any form of prefix misuse.

Yours,

Ran