Subject: Re: Draft Minutes for IPng Interim Meeting

From: "Matt Crawford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 11:58:32 -0500

I suggest that discussion of DNS, which was not on the advance
agenda, be considered not to have taken place.  Some people with
informed viewpoints were not present to correct various misstatements
which, as far as the minutes show, went unchallenged.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List
IPng Home Page:                      http://playground.sun.com/ipng
FTP archive:                      ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng
Direct all administrative requests to [email-masked]
--------------------------------------------------------------------

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 12:39:04 -0700

Matt,

>which, as far as the minutes show, went unchallenged.

It it's in the minutes it must have taken place.  I don't usually take 
notes on things that didn't take place   :-)

The presentation was intended to be a report from the DNS directorate on 
their discussion and recommendations on A6, DNAME, and bit-string 
labels.  The DNS directorate, like other directorates in the IETF, doesn't 
have any official standing.  It will make a recommendation to the DNSEXT 
working group where a real discussion should happen.  As you point out, 
people with potentially differing views were not at the IPng interim meeting.

Would you like the minutes to be updated to make this clearer?

Bob

---

From: Jim Bound <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:26:05 -0400 (EDT)

Matt,

I challenge any notion of altering the long effort of A6 but at the
meeting it was made clear to several of my questions that any input from
any directorate will have discussion and technical analysis by the WG once
the work is presented from the DNS directorate.  So I let it go for now.
So politically I was shutdown and no details were presented in any depth
for discussion.  That is the next step I presume.  There was no
opportunity to challenge as nothing of details were presented.

I do question why though why you, and others like Bob Halley, Bill
Manning, Paul Vixie, David Conrad et al were not part of this directorate
who architected and implemented A6 with running code were not part of this
directorates deliberations.  And will be looking carefully at the
technical details from the directorate with great anticipation.

I agree that it should have been noted on the agenda so you and others who
were authors / implementors of A6 knew ahead of time that it was to be
presented.  IMO that was an unfortuneate oversight in listing the agenda.

regards,

/jim

---

From: "JIM FLEMING" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 10:54:01 -0500

When you say "politically shutdown", do you mean censored ?

Where were you shutdown ?

Has this list been shutdown ?

Jim Fleming
http://www.unir.com/images/architech.gif
http://www.unir.com/images/address.gif
http://www.unir.com/images/headers.gif
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/domainname/130dftmail/unir.txt
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/sdks/platform/tpipv6/start.asp

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Jim Bound
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 10:26 AM
To: Matt Crawford
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Draft Minutes for IPng Interim Meeting

Matt,

regards,

/jim

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 08:57:28 -0700

> I challenge any notion of altering the long effort of A6

may i suggest that it might be more productive to discuss the engineering
need (or not) for it, and stick to principles not personalities?  

e.g. in the absense of rapid renumbering and gse or other non-v4 routing,
what need is sufficiently important to justify a6?  if there is none
currently, but one arises in the future (and i sure hope something does
arise for at least routing), then, if dns mechanisms are needed, appropriate
ones can be specified.  and those could be a6, i can't prejudge.

in the meantime, it would be a real bummer if the current a6 spec, for which
there seems to be little documented actual need, was to prejudice designs
for critical problems such as routing because some interesting approach
would not work with a6.

randy

---

From: "JIM FLEMING" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 11:14:12 -0500

A6 and IPv6 seem to fit together.

IPv8 and IPv16 only use AAAA.

Maybe the ICANN Board needs to "take this offline" ?
...in my opinion, ICANN can take all of IPv6 offline...

Jim Fleming
http://www.unir.com

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked]
[mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of Randy Bush
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 10:57 AM
To: Jim Bound
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Draft Minutes for IPng Interim Meeting

randy

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 17:07:22 +0700

Date:        Sat, 09 Jun 2001 08:57:28 -0700
    From:        Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | e.g. in the absense of rapid renumbering and gse or other non-v4 routing,
  | what need is sufficiently important to justify a6?

Unless something happened to routing I'm not aware of (which is
certainly possible), we still need rapid renumbering.

So, it isn't in the absence of that...

  | if there is none
  | currently, but one arises in the future (and i sure hope something does
  | arise for at least routing), then, if dns mechanisms are needed, appropriate
  | ones can be specified.  and those could be a6, i can't prejudge.

You're proposing that once we get millions of real operational nets
running v6, that we'll be able to go change the format of the DNS record
that is used to find them all?   What mechanism would you suggest exists
that makes that feasible?

  | in the meantime, it would be a real bummer if the current a6 spec, for which
  | there seems to be little documented actual need, was to prejudice designs
  | for critical problems such as routing because some interesting approach
  | would not work with a6.

It truly would indeed.   Especially as anything that works with AAAA works
with A6, given that A6 0 and AAAA are isomorphic.   So you're suggesting
the possibility of something which wouldn't work with any proposed DNS
lookup mechanism - that would be a pain.

But to me this looks like FUD?   Where's the documented actual design that
is being prejudiced by A6?

The reason for switching to A6 now, even if we tell people to only ever
put A6 0 in their zone files, is because it makes it possible to use it
later.  If it turns out to be unecessary, then we end up carrying around
one extra byte with each address in DNS packets (a 6% overhead on the
addresses themselves, less than that once all the rest of the DNS overheads
are added (TTL, class, record type, ...) are included in the RDATA).

kre

---

From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 03:24:42 -0700

>> what need is sufficiently important to justify a6?

we NEED both, and, imiho, routing far more than rapid renumbering.  but,
in reality we seem to HAVE neither.

> later.

the set of fun ideas which meet such design criteria may be countable, but
its size is large by even astronomers' standards.

randy

---

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 17:48:02 +0700

Date:        Sun, 10 Jun 2001 03:24:42 -0700
    From:        Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | we NEED both, and, imiho, routing far more than rapid renumbering.  but,
  | in reality we seem to HAVE neither.

I agree.

Which is why I wonder at why you're not supporting A6, as while a DNS
record can't possibly affect how routing is done, it can certainly help
renumbering, and it is beyond question that A6 can make renumbering
happen faster (if I only have to change one RR to renumber my net, I
can do that faster than if I have to change 100, even assuming that I
am able to do the latter via some kind of global change over a single
zone file, which is not necessarily true).  And if you only have to
fetch one updated RR to know that all my nodes have renumbered, you can
do that faster than fetching 100 (or 10,000).

Most of the people who aren't supporting A6 seem to be taking the
position that renumbering doesn't matter anyway.  If that were true, then
I'd be more inclined to not bother with A6, even though it might make
net admin easier (that side of it can probably mostly be handled by
smarter zonefile generation).

kre

---

From: Jim Bound <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 22:55:12 -0400 (EDT)

> need (or not) for it, and stick to principles not personalities?  

principles will be easier once we see a draft for sure.  comment on
personalities was my input to experts I felt missing from the directorate. 
just my opinion which I am free to state here.
 
> ones can be specified.  and those could be a6, i can't prejudge.

A6 was built, achieved consensus, and is being implemented to verify it
works for rapid renumbering.
 
> for critical problems such as routing because some interesting approach

I cannot see A6 doing the above but I await the draft/report eagerly to
here the logic why this is valid.  I will respond with technical
commentary to the technical issues the Directorate states to warrant
over-turning the consensus of the IPng working group to make several
important DNS IPng specs historic or experimental.  Maybe I will be
surprised.

regards,
/jim

---

From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 15:59:42 -0400

The basic problem is that neither the IPv6 community nor the DNS
community has reached a clear consensus on whether the extra features
of A6 over AAAA are worth the extra cost.  That's not a euphemism for
"have decided that they're not", I really mean that we have people
advocating each side in each group and have not answered the question.

So we attempted to approach the question from the angle of "what does
IPv6 need the DNS to do?"  Since that question also appears to be a
potential rathole, we tried to focus on the specific areas in which A6
would allow us to do things that can't be done with just AAAA and some
preprocessing during zone file generation.

All the cases we thought of that would justify A6 appeared to boil
down to situations where the DNS data would have to change so fast
that it isn't practical to update the DNS that quickly (eg, rapid
renumbering, or GSE-like routing).

So the question to the IPv6 WGs is: is IPv6 going to be doing these
things?  If so, AAAA probably is not sufficient, and A6 may be the
answer.  If not, AAAA may or may not be sufficient, but the new
features that A6 provides don't appear to be justified by IPv6's
requirements.

---

From: Jim Bound <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 08:36:07 -0400 (EDT)

Rob,

Can you give us an idea of when the report will be out?

p.s. AAAA is deployed too fyi.

thanks

/jim