Re: Complaints Against The IESG and The RFC-Editor About Publication of RFC-2188 (ESRO)

[Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>]

Mohsen BANAN wrote:
>               Complaints Against The IESG
>                    and The RFC-Editor
>            About Publication of RFC-2188 (ESRO)
>
>                       Mohsen Banan
>                     mohsen at neda.com
>
>                     November 5, 1998
I suppose I should make a note to this, since I was apps AD at the time:

I think ESRO is a badly designed protocol that would have been harmful 
to the Internet if it had ever been deployed at scale.
The IESG pointed some of the issues out to the RFC Editor, who handled 
the communication with the author; that was the procedure at that time.
Nevertheless, the RFC Editor felt that the document was worthy of 
publication, and published anyway.

The IESG note put on this document says:

IESG Note

  This protocol has not had the benefit of IETF Working Group review,
  but a cursory examination reveals several issues which may be
  significant issues for scalability.  A site considering deployment
  should conduct a careful analysis to ensure they understand the
  potential impacts.

That's more or less consistent with the now-standard note put on all RFC 
Editor independent submissions, but at that time, it was an unusually 
strong statement.
Of course, it was far milder than the one put on the EMSD spec, RFC 
2524, published in February 1999:

IESG Note

  The protocol specified in this document may be satisfactory for
  limited use in private wireless IP networks.  However, it is
  unsuitable for general-purpose message transfer or for transfer of
  messages over the public Internet, because of limitations that
  include the following:

  - Lack of congestion control

     EMSD is layered on ESRO [RFC 2188], which does not provide
     congestion control.  This makes EMSD completely unsuitable for
     end-to-end use across the public Internet.  EMSD should be
     considered for use in a wireless network only if all EMSD email
     exchanged between the wireless network and the public Internet
     will transit an EMSD<->SMTP gateway between the two regions.

  - Inadequate security

     The document specifies only clear-text passwords for
     authentication.  EMSD should be used across a wireless network
     only if sufficiently strong encryption is in use to protect the
     clear-text password.

  - Lack of character set internationalization

     EMSD has no provision for representation of characters outside of
     the ASCII repertoire or for language tags.

  - Poorly defined gatewaying to and from Internet Mail

     Because Internet Mail and EMSD have somewhat different and
     conflicting service models and different data models, mapping
     between them may provide good service only in limited cases, and
     this may cause operational problems.

  The IESG therefore recommends that EMSD deployment be limited to
  narrow circumstances, i.e., only to communicate with devices that
  have inherent limitations on the length and format of a message (no
  more than a few hundred bytes of ASCII text), using either:

  a. wireless links with adequate link-layer encryption and gatewayed
     to the public Internet, or

  b. a private IP network that is either very over-provisioned or has
     some means of congestion control.

  In the near future, the IESG may charter a working group to define an
  Internet standards-track protocol for efficient transmission of
  electronic mail messages, which will be highly compatible with
  existing Internet mail protocols, and which wil be suitable for
  operation over the global Internet, including both wireless and wired
  links.

In this case, too, the RFC Editor exercised the RFC Editor's independent 
judgment and published the document.

The Internet seems to have survived the publication, but I can't see any 
tangible benefit to the Internet from their publication either.

WRT formalities, Google found this reply to the posting of the note:

http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg08332.html

which seems to indicate that the IAB archives should show what happened 
afterwards; the mailing list also had a followup discussion that might 
be of interest.

This was eight years ago. The IESG that the complaint was made against was:

Alvestrand, Harald 	Applications
Bradner, Scott 	Transport
Burgan, Jeff 	Internet
Curran, John 	Operations & Management
Halpern, Joel 	Routing
Moore, Keith 	Applications
Narten, Thomas 	Internet
O'Dell, Michael 	Operations & Management
Reynolds, Joyce 	User Services
Romanow, Allyn 	Transport
Schiller, Jeff 	Security


What's the point of reposting this message now?

                                 Harald



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