Re: [Ecrit] Forest guides

[Otmar Lendl <lendl at nic.at>]

On 2006/12/19 04:12, Henning Schulzrinne <hgs at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
> I'll change the subject line to reflect the more substantive issue  
> you are raising.

Good.

> I'm trying to walk a fine line in providing an architectural  
> description that illustrates what's possible, without trying to nail  
> down various practical "governance" approaches. In practice, I think  
> a few options are possible:

Your list of options makes a lot of sense. 

I'm a bit lost though, what the process will be to to establish one
of these options as the solution which will be deployed. My experience
in the ENUM world makes me a bit wary about mixing protocol issues
with world-wide political agreements. There are many pitfalls
and potential delays (dare I say "ITU"?) to consider when trying
to forge world-wide cooperation for this collaborative effort.

Based on this, I'd rule out 

> - A real root, run by somebody. This is plausible for commercial  
> directories for non-emergency services, possibly for a more limited  
> geographic region. Effectively, a single FG or a single tree,  
> depending on how you look at it.
> 
> - A "cooperative club": A group of organizations that propagate each  
> other's announcements, but have some mechanism for admitting new  
> members.

as a short-term solution.

> - A "semi-cooperative club": Everybody propagates most records, maybe  
> with exceptions.
> 
> - Full peering: Each FG peers with all (say) countries it wants to  
> work with. Thus, the "official" US FG would not talk to Iran and  
> Cuba, say, except maybe through Switzerland.

These two options are more reasonable in the short term, though I'm not
sure that even such a loose cooperation between countries is easy and
fast to set up.

> In each case, records may be signed or, in a more tightly controlled  
> environment, not.

That depends a lot on protocol details for overage announcements and
FG synchronization.

Perhaps we just need to specify a data-format which each
country/organization can use to publish it's coverage region with the
entrance point to its tree. Anybody then can aggregate this information
as they wish to configure their FG.

One of the open questions is whether we should even try to develop
a protocol for FG synchronization. That data is rather static anyway, so
I don't see the pressing need to encode all the politics of which
coverage announcements to honor into software.

As I see it, either go for an ENUM-like worldwide agreement, or leave
the question of FGs open to competing aggregation services.
(Similar to RSS aggregation or news.google.com)

/ol
-- 
< Otmar Lendl (lendl at nic.at) | nic.at Systems Engineer >

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