Subject: Re: About IETF communication skills

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:42:31 -0400

Ole Jacobsen wrote:
> I agree with Paul.
> 
> Having now quickly read the article in question I don't even see what 
> the "problem" is, including the somewhat provocative headline.

I think it's a huge problem if the market gets the idea that NATs (as we 
currently know them) will also be a part of IPv6.
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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 10:54:46 -0400

On Fri, 1 Aug 2008 07:38:27 +0100
Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Folks: please review all of the IETF-related articles in the IT trade 
> press from the past five years. Discard the articles that say "the 
> IETF is considering Foo" when in fact someone had submitted a -00 
> draft. The very small pile that remains, including interviews with 
> our leadership about where they think the IETF is going and in-depth 
> articles comparing multiple contenders being considered in IETF 
> areas, are mostly written by Carolyn Duffy Marsan.

Indeed.  I've personally dealt with her quite often, and she's always
represented what I've said quite accurately and fairly -- even one time
when I wished she hadn't....  I have exactly zero complaints about her
reporting.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Aug 2008 18:27:11 +0200

Paul Hoffman wrote:

> mostly written by Carolyn Duffy Marsan.

In Germany it's often Monika Emmert.

 [John Morris wrote]
| My 2 cents....

Euro Cents, at least.  Accredited journalists and other 
proposals for another millennium sounded like "Spanish
inquisition, reloaded".  The number of folks entitled
to "speak for the IETF" if they dare is limited to one.

 Frank
-- 
Plus the liaisons listed on an IAB page wrt their work,
of course.

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 22:05:59 +0100

On Jul 31, 2008, at 5:52 PM, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:

> Some considered that part of the delay of the IPv6 deployment was  
> due to the lack of communication effort from IETF. I'm not really  
> sure about that, however I agree that everything helps, of course.

To be honest, I think IPv6 has been overmarketed.

Let me ask you a question. When do you buy a new car? If you're at all  
like me, you buy a new car when the old one isn't serving your needs  
any more. Since buying a new car is a big expense, you put it off as  
long as you can.

IPv6 solves a problem service providers will have in 1-2 years. We  
knew a decade ago that it would be 1-2 years from now, but with less  
precision. A decade ago, the problem it solves wasn't one the service  
providers had, so investing in the technology only made sense from a  
research or early-adopter perspective. Everyone else put the  
investment off.

But IPv6 was heavily marketed. That leaves people saying, now that the  
problem is materializing, "yeah, yeah, yeah, been hearing about that  
for years."
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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:43:38 -0700 (PDT)

> To be honest, I think IPv6 has been overmarketed.

Badly and inaccurately marketed, you bet. Overmarketed, not really. AFAICT a
heck of a lot of people who really need to know about IPv6 have barely even
heard of it.

> any more. Since buying a new car is a big expense, you put it off as

Sure, but I doubt that you wait until your old car is a pile of unworkable junk
before you even start considering what new car to buy. In fact I bet you pay at
least some attention to what cars are available or will soon be available that
interest you. I know I do.

Marketing isn't necessarily about getting someone to buy something right now.
Indeed, the best marketing campaingns are often ones that work to establish a
brand first, and get people to actually buy that brand second.

I drive a 2001 Prius, a car Toyota started advance marketing almost a year
before it was even available in this country. That advance marketing was so
successful even though I signed up for one as soon as it was possible to do so
I still had to wait four mohths to get it.

But with companies increasingly only looking as far ahead as the next quarter,
it is terribly easy to fall into the trap of not working to set realistic
expectations and establish brands properly. (And don't get me started on the
adverse impact this has on actual products.)

it also doesn't help that good marketing people are, in my experience at least,
much much harder to find than engineering talent. (I'm speaking now as a former
CEO, not as an engineer.)

> problem is materializing, "yeah, yeah, yeah, been hearing about that

What they've been hearing for years is a lot of sporadic crying wolf, with the
result that those that have heard of IPv6 have a bad opinion of it. That's
about the worst possible marketing you can do, but it isn't overmarketing.

				Ned

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:41:16 -0400

Fred Baker wrote:
>> Some considered that part of the delay of the IPv6 deployment was due 
>> to the lack of communication effort from IETF. I'm not really sure 
>> about that, however I agree that everything helps, of course.
> 
> like me, you buy a new car when the old one isn't serving your needs any 
> more. Since buying a new car is a big expense, you put it off as long as 
> you can.
> 
> IPv6 solves a problem service providers will have in 1-2 years. We knew 
> a decade ago that it would be 1-2 years from now, but with less 
> research or early-adopter perspective. Everyone else put the investment 
> off.

This analysis ignores the inherent chicken-and-egg nature of IPv6 
deployment.  There would be no point in the service providers supporting 
IPv6 in the next year or two if the platform and applications support 
were not already largely in place.

So the service providers drug their feet, but at least the OS platform 
people did their jobs reasonably well.  As, I assume, the router vendors 
did also.

> problem is materializing, "yeah, yeah, yeah, been hearing about that for 
> years."

But that was necessary, because there were so many different audiences 
that needed to get the word on IPv6 - just at different times.

Keith

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From: Geoff Huston <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 02 Aug 2008 05:49:50 +1000

Like Steve Bellovin, I have always believed that I've been treated 
accurately and fairly and I really don't understand what this
thread is all about. 

Yes, I stand by what I said in that article. If you disagree with
my perspective on this topic, then perhaps you may want to followup
with me directly, rather than claim some shortcoming on the part
of the journalist.

Geoff

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:27:05 -0400

> with me directly, rather than claim some shortcoming on the part

Well, of course, the things you are quoted as saying are separate from 
the spin given by the author and/or editor.  But I reread the article to 
refresh my memory as to what you were quoted as saying, and I do have a 
disagreement or two:

(from the article:)

> Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC and an expert on IPv4 address
> depletion, says it's important for the IETF to develop high-quality
> NATs for IPv6 instead of ignoring the requirement as it did with NATs
> for IPv4. "Frankly, it's a NAT-dense Internet these days, and I for
> one would rather see the world as it is than steadfastly maintain a
> position of high principle in the face of reality," Huston says. "The
> challenge to the IETF is whether it is prepared to shed its biases
> here and figure out what would makes NATs in IPv6 slightly less
> odious than what we did in IPv4."

I find the comparison of "reality" vs. "principle" really misleading and 
unhelpful, especially as a public statement.

The problems with IPv4 NATs are real and numerous.  And IPv4 NATs cause 
problems not because they violate "principles", but because they rob 
applications developers of functionality, make the net less reliable and 
less flexible, increase the cost of running applications and raise the 
barrier for new applications, and increase the effort and expense 
required to troubleshoot problems.

I'm reasonably certain that you're aware of all of this.

> Huston says NATs are useful for addressing, packet filtering and
> other functions. He says the real problem with NATs is that they lack
> standards, and that is an area where the IETF can make improvements
> in NATs for IPv6.

Strongly disagree.

Most of the real problems with IPv4 NATs that I've outlined above could 
not have been solved merely by having IPv4 NAT behavior be standardized.

- There was no way to get rid of multiple addressing realms in an IPv4 
NAT world, and the resulting problems for host addressability across 
realm boundaries.

- There was no way to get rid of port mapping, and the consequent need 
to have NA[P]Ts allocate and destroy address bindings (causing 
connections to break) in a world where NATs were used as a way to deal 
with IPv4 address shortages.

- Given the inevitability of port mapping, there was no way to avoid 
having NATs impose apparently arbitrary (to applications) barriers to 
connections even when those barriers had nothing to do with security policy.

Of course, standardized IPv4 NATs would have been somewhat preferable to 
the hodgepodge of NAT behaviors that exists now.  But I don't think we 
understood NATs well enough ten years ago (which is when I think we 
would have had to standardize them for those standards to have had much 
effect) to know how to make better-behaved IPv4 NATs.  And I don't think 
we could have avoided the worst of the problems with IPv4 NAT even if we 
had had an idea of what a better-behaved IPv4 NAT would look like.

But back to the notion of "principle".

It's easy to dismiss those who cite "principle" as being over-idealistic 
or out of touch.  And it's easy to dismiss arguments whose subtlety one 
doesn't understand as appeals to "principle".  But when people appeal to 
principles in discussions of the Internet and its protocols what they're 
generally saying is a shorthand for something like this:

    There is a relatively simple model that most of us understand for
    how the Internet was intended to work.   As long as we stick to
    that model, we will generally understand the consequences of our
    design decisions within that space.  But when we deviate
    significantly from that model, we are in new territory.  We do not
    understand what will happen, either as individuals or as a community
    whose decisions affect one another.  That's not to say that
    "principles" should never be changed or violated, but rather, that
    we need considerably more time and analysis to understand the
    consequences of violations of "principle", than we need to make
    design decisions which stay within those "principles".

To reiterate: NATs don't cause us problems because they violate 
principles, they cause us problems because they break things.   But the 
fact that the principles were being violated by NATs, was a clue that 
significant problems might result from their use.   Sadly, many people 
ignored those clues because they didn't trust arguments that appealed 
primarily to principle... and by the time the actual problems were 
well-understood, it was too late.

> "The IETF's position of ignoring NATs some years back forced NAT
> software builders to exercise their own creativity when designing
> their version of NATs," Huston says. "This variation of NAT behavior
> is a far, far worse problem than NATs themselves."

Again, this presupposes that IETF would have collectively been able to 
understand what individual NAT vendors apparently did not.  And in my 
recollection, IETF did not ignore NATs.  Certainly I tried hard to make 
people aware of the problems that NATs would cause, and I wasn't the 
only one.  Really I think IETF did not try to address the IPv4 NAT 
problem because no good solution was known...and a sure way to waste 
time and frustrate people is to convene a WG without having any idea how 
they'll solve the problem.  If we had had a concrete proposal, things 
might have been different.  But I don't recall seeing one, and I tried 
to come up with one myself and failed.

And after all this time I think I have a pretty good handle on how to 
make an IPv4-IPv6 NAT be well behaved - but I still don't know how to 
make IPv4 NAT work well.

Keith