US patent 5473599

Tue May 6 22:17:58 UTC 2014

Constantine,

On May 6, 2014, at 4:15 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <mureninc at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Protocol 112 was assigned by IANA for VRRP in 1998.
>> 
>> When did OpenBSD choose to squat on 112?
> 
> If you don't use it, you lose it.

Are you suggesting no one is running VRRP? Surprising given RFC 5798.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, it would seem the OpenBSD developers decided to squat on 112 in 2003, 5 years after 112 was assigned.

> There are only so many protocol numbers; out of those potentially
> available and non-conflicting,

Yes. That is exactly why most responsible and professional developers work with IANA to obtain the assignments they need instead of intentionally squatting on numbers, particularly numbers known to be already assigned.

> it was deemed the best choice to go
> with the protocol number that was guaranteed to be useless otherwise.

Except it wasn't useless: it was, in fact, in use by VRRP.  Further, the OpenBSD developers chose to squat on 240 for pfsync - a number that has not yet been allocated.  If the OpenBSD developers were so concerned about making the best choice, it seems odd they chose an allocated number for one protocol and an unallocated number for another protocol.

To be honest, it would seem from appearances that OpenBSD's use of 112 was deemed a "cute" (that is, unprofessional and irresponsible) way for the OpenBSD developers to say 'screw you' to the IETF, IANA, Cisco, network operators, etc. The fact that OpenBSD developers continue to defend this choice is one reason why I won't run OpenBSD (or CARP).

> Any complaints for Google using the https port 443 for SPDY?

AFAIK, the use of SPDY does not preclude the use of HTTPS on the same network. The fact that in addition to the OpenBSD developers choosing to use 112, they also chose to use the MAC addresses used for VRRP, thus making it impossible to run both VRRP and CARP on the same network due to MAC address conflicts would suggest you might want to pick a better analogy.

Regards,
-drc

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