On 12/2/2011 8:50 PM, Ross Callon wrote: >>> If a customer uses a CGN-specific allocation on the inside of >>> their network as if it were RFC 1918 space, then, yes, they will >>> have trouble if they ever use a provider that uses a CGN. >> >> Thanks. So my point is, this proposed allocation doesn't solve >> anything, it just kicks the can down the road a while. That's not >> enough benefit to justify the cost. > > This particular argument has been bothering me for a while. > > We write standards. Our RFCs that specify protocols or best current > practices contain statements along the lines of MUST or MUST NOT (and > yes other documents also may use this terminology). People who > implement or who deploy products could at least in principle ignore > some of these statements, and implement or deploy equipment in ways > that violate the MUST and MUST NOT statements in our documents. When > they do this, bad things may happen. > > This is not a valid reason for us to stop writing standards, nor to > stop putting MUST statements in our standards. To a certain extent of course you're right. But that's not the question before us. This is a resource allocation question. More particularly, it's a scarce resource, and making that allocation will have costs. So it's incumbent on us to do a cost::benefit analysis to determine whether the benefits of doing the allocation justify the costs. (I'm not trying to talk down to anyone here, I'm just repeating what I think we all know in order to take the conversation out of the abstract world that you're describing and put it back into the concrete world of this particular question.) So in regards to this particular resource allocation in order to determine what should be on the benefit side of the ledger we ask ourselves the question, "Will this allocation solve the problem that it attempts to solve?" (Note, I'm purposely ignoring the preliminary questions, such as, "Is this a problem we _want_ to solve?") The answer, for better or worse, is "No." Doing the allocation will postpone the pain, until such time as those folks that we keep hearing have exhausted all of 1918 internally catch on, and then start using this block as 1918 space. So because the benefits of doing the allocation are spotty at best, and the cost is high, we shouldn't do it. Q.E.D. Doug -- "We could put the whole Internet into a book." "Too practical." Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS. Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf