On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 09:31:41AM -0800, Melinda Shore wrote: > On 4/11/17 9:18 AM, Nico Williams wrote: > > One could give a lot of advice for design of protocols with > > "friendly" middle boxes. Merely saying "hey, they are good" is not > > enough. We might want to revisit end-to-end protocol design as well > > (e.g., maybe ICMP isn't working so well; what can we do?). > > There have been a number of efforts to provide mechanisms for > applications to communicate explicitly with middleboxes. None > has gotten any traction, and for the moment it looks like > anything that requires changes to middleboxes along those > lines is unlikely to be successful. That said: Sure, but if we wanted to have an Informational RFC describing all the goodness and badness and history of middle-box-aware protocools, that might not be bad, and we could detail all those protocols that failed to get traction and why. I think such a document would end up favoring end-to-end protocols, even if it didn't start out with that as a goal :) > > IMO the IETF must not publish draft-dolson-plus-middlebox-benefits as > > it is today. > > No, clearly not. I'm actually not sure I see a lot of benefit > to publishing a more balanced document, either, in the sense that > it's not likely to lead anybody to do anything differently. I'm not advocating for publishing a more balanced document. I only advocate not publishing draft-dolson-plus-middlebox-benefits. If the authors come back with a more balanced document, I might be willing to support it, though I can say right now that I would expect the result to favor the end-to-end model, and if it ended up advocating middle boxes much more intelligent than routers then I'd be surprised. Nico --