carping about CARP

Fri Nov 30 20:04:19 UTC 2012

>> I believe that idea has legs regardless of practical considerations
>> and stands on it's own.
>> 
>> Besides, I won't discount OpenBSD out of hand for forging ahead,
>> withstanding practical issues, considering the runs they've got on the
>> board and the many facepalm fails we see in the diametrically opposed
>> corporate world.
>> 
>> It might be a very good thing they've bothered to take the time on this.
> 
> The problem here is "insufficient paranoia about packets that come
> flying in over the transom, based on naive contemporaneous belief that
> a particular protocol number was not in use".  I mean, gosh, who would
> ever send packets on an unused protocol number?  And who other than us
> would get frustrated with the process and decide to forge ahead on
> their own.
> 

Perhaps we should ask IETF/IANA to allocate a group of protocol numbers
to "the wild west". A protocol-number equivalent of RFC-1918 or private ASNs.
You can use these for whatever you want, but so can anyone else and if you
do, you do so at your own risk.

This won't entirely solve the problem, but at least it would provide some
level of shield for protocol numbers that are registered to particular
purposes through the IETF/IANA process.

Owen