[mif] Some thoughts

[William Herrin <bill at herrin.us>]

Hi Folks,

I'm just joining the list. I would join you at the meeting but I'm
about half a world away right now...

I've read the charter and the draft problem statement at
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-mif-problem-statement-01.txt and
I've leafed through the list archives. I have some comments I'd like
to share as I try to get up to speed. Feedback would be helpful.


1. The draft seems pretty focused on end-hosts, that is systems which
originate or consume but don't forward IP packets.

Routers are hosts too and figuring out how to handle packets to
multiple upstreams in different administrative domains is important
there as well. Otherwise we limit ourselves to only the simplest case:
where no component larger than a single host is a member of two
networks. As often as not, that isn't the case. The entire local LAN
can be a member of two upstream networks and it'd be nice if entire
routed subsystems could be members of two networks.

Even if we don't want to address the router case explicitly, it might
be helpful to look at whether the router case offers any insight into
the grouping and relationship between the issues in the host case.

Source address selection, for example, could be viewed through a
routing lens: find the destination in the routing tables associated
with each of the hosts's source addresses, return a list of source
addresses for which the destination is reachable and weight the list
based on the specificity and metric of the respective route.

Looking at the problem from that angle, all hosts are MIF hosts. They
have a unique loopback network which is administratively separate from
any physical wire to which they attach. Put another way: from the
perspective of MIF, loopback doesn't look like a special case.



2. DNS strikes me as a subset of a bigger problem: naming services.
Other naming services such as the windows browser, windows domains,
LDAP and NIS will be impacted in more or less the same way that the
DNS is.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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