On 7/30/13 12:29 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Users want applications to just work, but they (and many business > managers in our "industry") don't understand that when applications > fail unpredictably, it's often because of glitches in what we call > transparency. I suspect applications are not failing unpredictably often enough, seriously enough, or impossible-to-fix-edly enough (thank you, I'm here all week) to provide incentive for radical change in the network, which elimination of problematic middleboxes would certainly represent. There are several things going on now that I think hold some promise for overall approaches to improving the situation but it's just hard to work on middlebox problems in the IETF because you can't avoid getting bogged down in rehashing the same ideological debates over and over and over again. Yes, problematic middlebox behavior causes real-world problems but cursing the darkness hasn't yet been productive and I'm reasonably sure that it never will be, particularly in a world where vendors are churning out those cursed boxes and network operators and data centers are buying them. > However, we are in an arms race here. Every step to improve transparency > will be met by a further step in middleboxes that nibbles away at > transparency. We've been debating this for 15 years; have you seen > any real change in the balance of power? I'm not sure there is a balance of power between the people selling middleboxes and the IETF. In fact, I'm rather certain there isn't. Melinda