Gen-art review: draft-ietf-6renum-gap-analysis-05.txt

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I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft. For background on
Gen-ART, please see the FAQ at

<http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/area/gen/trac/wiki/GenArtfaq>.

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments
you may receive.

Document: draft-ietf-6renum-gap-analysis-05.txt
Reviewer: Robert Sparks
Review Date: April 1, 2013
IETF LC End Date: April 10,2013
IESG Telechat date: Not yet scheduled for a telechat

Summary: This document is not ready for publication as an Informational RFC.
         It may be on the right track, but there issues both in substance
         and form that need to be addressed.

Major issues:

The document doesn't provide what its title and abstract claim it will provide. For instance, the abstract claims a gap analysis is presented following a renumbering event procedure summary, but neither appear in the draft. There are a few places in the text that say "this is a gap", but usually it's not clear what "this" means.

The stated intent is to identify missing capabilities (gaps) and the work
needed to provide them. The document should lay these out very clearly. As the
document is currently written, it is difficult to pull out a simple list of
identified gaps. While addressing that, it would help more to provide some
sense of the relative importance of addressing each of the gaps identified.

There are several significant issues with clarity. I will point to the most
difficult in a section below.

----------------------
Minor issues:

The document currently references draft-chown-v6ops-renumber-thinkabout several times. That document is long expired (2006). It would be better to simply restate what is important from that document here and reference it only once in the acknowlegements
rather than send the reader off to read it.

RFC4076 seems to say very similar things to this document. Should it have been referenced?

Section 5.3 punts discussion of static addresses off to RFC 6866. That document was scoped only to Enterprise Networks. The scope of this document is larger. Are there gaps because of that difference in scope that were missed? Would it make sense to summarize any gaps
RFC 6866 identified that are relevant to this document here?

Should section 8 belong to some other document? It looks like operational renumbering advice/considerations, but doesn't seem to be exploring renumbering gaps, except for the very short section 8.2 which says "we need a better mechanism" without much explanation.


----------------------
Text needing clarity (more than nits):

Section 4.1, second paragraph: The first sentence needs to be simplified. Something like "Delegation routers may need to renumber themselves with new delegated prefixes" perhaps. The second sentence speaks of "the router renumbering issue" as if it's clear which particular issue you're actually talking about. Is there a gap here? If so, consider replacing the entire
paragraph with an explicit description of the gap.

Section 5.1, first bullet, 2nd paragraph: The third sentence (starting "In ND protocol,")
makes no sense. The fourth sentence is also hard to parse.

Section 5.1, first bullet. The list below "the impact of ambiguous M/O flags" says things like "there is no standard" and "it is unspecified". I think you are trying to say that there is ambiguity in what's written, not that nothing's written. This entire list would benefit from
being recast in terms of what needs to be done (what are the gaps?).

Section 5.2, last paragraph. It's not clear what you are trying to say here. Is it simply that the natural pressures in an ISP make it more likely that an ISP would choose to use DNS names as part of configuration than an enterprise would? If so, can you list what some
of those pressures are? What gap is this discussion trying to identify?

Section 6.1, first paragraph, first sentence (starting "For DNS records update") - this sentence does not parse. What is it trying to say, and what's the gap you are trying to point to?

Section 6.3, 6th paragraph. "So there's a big gap for configuration aggregation" is unclear. Is it that configuration isn't stored in one place, or that it can't be
found through one place, or something different?

Section 7.1 second bullet. Taking this partial quote from RFC4192 destroyed the meaning of the sentence. The original sentence said "The suggestion applies" - this misquote says "reducing the delay applies". There's no benefit to quoting 4192 directly - say what you
mean and reference 4192.


----------------------
Nits/editorial comments:

There are a few sentences ending with "etc." in the document. Please consider deleting the
word from the list - it doesn't help each sentence make its point.

Introduction: "Future efforts may be achieved in the future." doesn't add anything
to the document. I suggest deleting the sentence.

Section 3.2: Consider deleting "basically" from "an IPAM is basically used"

Section 5.1: draft-ietf-dhc-host-gen-id is no longer new (and it definitely will not be new a few years after this is published as an RFC. Please remove "the new IETF DHC WG
document" from the sentence it appears in.

Section 5.1: This sentence "Using these flags, the two separated address configuration modes are somehow correlated." is not clear. ("somehow" isn't going to help the reader in any case). Are you trying to say "This flags provide some degree of correlation in the use of these separate configuration protocols"? Could you rewrite this explicitly
identifying gaps?

Section 5.1: Please delete "mainly" from "flags mainly includes"

Section 5.2 (and other places): Is it really the case that router operators have to resort to restarting routers in order to pick up configuration changes these days? RFC2072 pointed to that, and in 1997 it may have been more routine to restart, but for modern systems, that action is more extreme. Surely for something as basic as
a cache-clear, restarts are vanishingly rare.

Section 5.3: Instead of "the static address issue" could you say "discussing the
problems associated with renumbering hosts with static addresses"?

Section 6, first paragraph: It's not clear what "the entries in the site" means. What's a site and what are entries in this case. I suggest "then any configuration or data store containing the previous number must be updated." as a replacement, and then say "Some examples include:" and list DNS records and ACLs. Consider pointing forward to the section on DNS Authority listed under "Gaps considered unsolvable". Note that some of those ACLS are going to be on machines under control by another
authority, having the same problem you point to for DNS.

Section 6.1: What do you mean by "the major DNS systems". Do you mean the major
implementations like BIND?

Section 6.2, first paragraph. This suffers from the ambiguity of the word
"records". You meant it as a verb (DNS writes something down) instead of
a noun (the DNS system contains DNS records). I suggest rewriting this
paragraph to avoid the ambiguity. "While DNS entries contain addresses" -
"Hosts are configured with" - "hosts must update these addreses"

Section 6.2 second paragraph. Please be more clear what you mean by
"DNS lifetimes". You are not trying to refer to the time-to-live of
a DNS record. Rather, you are trying to say how long a bit of configuration
obtained through DHCP should be considered relevant. If there's a gap
(a need for more protocol), please be explicit. You will proabably want
to engage the DHC working group if you are thinking about asking that
DHCP tell you how long DNS server configuration value is good for if you
are really trying to decouple it from the lease time. (Is that what
you're suggesting? If not, then what's the problem?)

Section 6.3, second bullet, second sub-bullet: What does "the entries" mean?
Please be specific. Do you mean "configured addresses or prefixes" or something
else? Or is this intended to extend to updating things like DNS zone files?
As written, it is vague.

Section 6.3, last sentence. "It is a big gap currently." What specifically
is the big gap. Is it a lack of a standard protocol for updating configurations
so that there won't be some many vendor-private protocols deployed?
Please consider replacing "It" with something explicit.

Seciton 7.1: The first bullet does not parse. If I guess its meaning correctly (that it would be benificial to tell hosts that local DNS has been updated and they may want to make fresh queries), please be careful with the wording. The
hosts don't know which names are likely to resolve locally.

Section 7.1, third bullet - This isn't obviously about notification. Why is it
in this section? What's the gap this is trying to identify?

Section 7.2 - how is this section helping the document? What are the gaps?

Section 7.3 - again, how is this section helping the document acheive its goal? Would anyone working to close gaps do anything differently if this section were
deleted?

Section 9.4 - what is it about these that make them gaps, much less unsolvable gaps.
Is this discussion in the wrong section of the document?

Section 10 - The sentence starting "In the LAN" doesn't parse. Did you mean
"may be needed to"?

Section 10, last paragraph: This sentence doesn't make sense. It would make more sense if you replaced "blocking access" with "protecting", but it would be even
better to expand the discussion and explain what you mean by interruption.





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