Anybody can participate in the IETF (Was: Why is IPv6 broken?)

Jeff Wheeler jsw at inconcepts.biz
Sun Jul 10 20:43:40 UTC 2011


On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 3:45 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> Number two: While anyone can participate, approaching IETF as an
> operator requires a rather thick skin, or, at least it did the last couple
> of times I attempted to participate. I've watched a few times where

I am subscribed to the IDR (BGP, etc.) and LISP lists.  These are
populated with different people and cover entirely different topics.
My opinion is the following:

* The IDR list is welcoming of operators, but whether or not your
opinion is listened to or included in the process, I do not know.
Randy Bush, alone, posts more on this list than the sum of all
operators who post in the time I've been reading.  I think Randy's
influence is 100% negative, and it concerns me deeply that one
individual has the potential to do so much damage to essential
protocols like BGP.  Also, the priorities of this list are pretty
fucked.  Inaction within this working group is the reason we still
don't have expanded BGP communities for 32 bit ASNs.  The reason for
this is operators aren't participating.  The people on the list or the
current participants of the WG should not be blamed.  My gripe about
Randy Bush having the potential to do huge damage would not exist if
there were enough people on the list who understand what they're doing
to offer counter-arguments.

> operators were shouted down by purists and religion over basic
> real-world operational concerns. It seems to be a relatively routine
> practice and does not lead to operators wanting to come back to
> an environment where they feel unwelcome.

I have found my input on the LISP list completely ignored because, as
you suggest, my concerns are real-world and don't have any impact on
someone's pet project.  LISP as it stands today can never work on the
Internet, and regardless of the fine reputations of the people at
Cisco and other organizations who are working on it, they are either
furthering it only because they would rather work on a pet project
than something useful to customers, or because they truly cannot
understand its deep, insurmountable design flaws at Internet-scale.
You would generally hope that someone saying, "LISP can't work at
Internet-scale because anyone will be able to trivially DoS any LISP
ITR ('router' for simplicity), but here is a way you can improve it,"
well, that remark, input, and person should be taken quite seriously,
their input examined, and other assumptions about the way LISP is
supposed to work ought to be questioned.  None of this has happened.
LISP is a pet project to get some people their Ph.D.s and keep some
old guard vendor folks from jumping ship to another company.  It is a
shame that the IETF is manipulated to legitimize that kind of thing.

Then again, I could be wrong.  Randy Bush could be a genius and LISP
could revolutionize mobility.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts




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