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(The document does seem to have the reference to RFC 2119 which the ID-Checklist requires). -- The document date (February 4, 2020) is 1514 days in the past. Is this intentional? Checking references for intended status: Proposed Standard ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (See RFCs 3967 and 4897 for information about using normative references to lower-maturity documents in RFCs) ** Obsolete normative reference: RFC 2028 (Obsoleted by RFC 9281) ** Downref: Normative reference to an Informational RFC: RFC 2321 Summary: 2 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 2 warnings (==), 1 comment (--). Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information about the items above. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Network Working Group W. Kumari 3 Internet-Draft February 4, 2020 4 Intended status: Standards Track 5 Expires: August 7, 2020 7 Just because it's an ID doesn't mean anything... at all... 8 draft-wkumari-not-a-draft-08 10 Abstract 12 Anyone can publish an Internet Draft. This doesn't mean that the 13 "IETF thinks" or that "the IETF is planning..." or anything similar. 15 Status of This Memo 17 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the 18 provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. 20 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 21 Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute 22 working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- 23 Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 25 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months 26 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any 27 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference 28 material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 30 This Internet-Draft will expire on August 7, 2020. 32 Copyright Notice 34 Copyright (c) 2020 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the 35 document authors. All rights reserved. 37 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal 38 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents 39 (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of 40 publication of this document. Please review these documents 41 carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect 42 to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must 43 include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of 44 the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as 45 described in the Simplified BSD License. 47 Table of Contents 49 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 50 1.1. Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 51 2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 52 3. Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 53 3.1. Feature Creep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 54 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 55 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 56 6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 57 7. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 58 Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 59 Appendix B. new section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 60 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 62 1. Introduction 64 All too often one reads something in the press, or some ravings on a 65 mailing list that reference some Internet Draft, that claim that "the 66 IETF thinks that XXX" or that the ID is an IETF document, and so 67 represents support by the IETF. 69 Repeatedly pointing at the RFC Editor page, carefully explaining what 70 an ID is (and isn't), describing how consensus is reached, detailing 71 the Independent Stream, etc doesn't seems to accomplish much. 73 So, here is an Internet Draft. I wrote it. It's full of nonsense. 74 It doesn't represent the "IETF's views"; it doesn't mean that the 75 IETF, the IESG, the RFC editor, any IETF participant, my auntie on my 76 father's side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the 77 drivel in it. [Editor note: Interestingly, after publishing version 78 -00 of this ID I got some feedback saying that some participants *do* 79 believe the below. As I plan to actually get this published as a 80 (probably AD sponsored) RFC, I guess someone will need to judge 81 consensus at IETF LC ] 83 Readers are expected to be familiar with Section 2.5 of [RFC2410] and 84 [RFC2321] 86 1.1. Requirements notation 88 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", 89 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and 90 "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in 91 BCP14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all 92 capitals, as shown here. 94 2. Background 96 Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades. The ancient Egyptians 97 has a major problem - wearing a big, bushy beard in the desert is 98 uncomfortable. Unfortunately the safely razor hadn't been invented 99 yet, and so they all had to use straight razors. Additionally, camel 100 leather makes a very poor strop, hippopotamus leather was reserved 101 for the pharaohs and crocodile leather, while suitable, had the 102 unfortunate property of being wrapped around crocodiles. 104 So, the ancient Egyptians had to come up with an alternative. This 105 led them to design and build hulking big monuments (with the 106 assistance of ancient aliens) to sharpen mass quantities of straight 107 razors. In order to defray the large costs of building pyramids, the 108 builders would charge a sharpening fee. For a single bushel of corn, 109 you could buy 27.5 sharpening tokens. Each one of their tokens could 110 be redeemed for 6.3 hours of sharpening time. 112 This all worked really well until approximately 1600BCE, at which 113 time the fleeing Atlanteans brought mass quantities of lightly tanned 114 eel leather into Egypt, causing the collapse of straight razor 115 sharpening market. This in turn led to the collapse of the stone 116 quarrying industry, which negatively affected the copper and sandal 117 manufacturers. The collapse of the entire system followed shortly 118 after. 120 This led to the aphorism "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into 121 your country; economic ruin follows close behind". Due to the overly 122 specific nature of this phrase it never really caught on. This 123 document rectifies this. 125 3. Usage 127 Many protocols send periodic "hello" messages, or respond to 128 liveliness probes. Other protocols (primarily for network monitoring 129 or testing) send traffic to cause congestion or similar. All ASCII 130 based IETF protocols should use the phrase "Don't allow eel bearing 131 Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind" as 132 the payload of such messages. This phrase is 88 characters; if your 133 protocol needs to align on 32bit boundaries it MAY be padded with 134 Null (\0) characters. 136 The closely related phrase "My hovercraft is full of eels" SHOULD be 137 used by any protocol incapable of encoding the ASCII character 'b' 138 (0x62). Internationalized protocols SHOULD use an appropriate 139 translation. Some devices are severely bandwidth and / or memory 140 constrained. There devices MAY use the ordinals 0 and 1 to represent 141 the strings "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; 142 economic ruin follows close behind" and "My hovercraft is full of 143 eels" respectively. Partially constrained devices SHOULD use the 144 string "TBA3" (or the ordinal TBA3). 146 3.1. Feature Creep 148 Unlike most IETF efforts, this document is not embarrassed to clearly 149 state that we are simply stuffing more stuff in while we have the 150 editor open. 152 A common source of confusion is the difference between "routing 153 protocols" and "routing protocols", especially when configuring BGP 154 peering sessions between civilized countries and the rest of the 155 world. In order to clearly differentiate these terms we assign the 156 ordinal 98 to be "routing protocols" and 0x62 to be "routing 157 protocols" (but pronounced with a funny accent). Protocols incapable 158 of encoding 0x62 should use the string "My hovercraft is full of 159 eels", a suitable translation of this phrase, or the ordinal 1. 161 4. IANA Considerations 163 The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named 164 "Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signalling 165 transmissions (ROISSFUAIST)". 167 Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the 168 string, and the ordinal being requested. Choosing an ordinal at 169 random is encouraged (to safe the IANA from having to do this). The 170 ordinals 17, 42 and 6.12 are reserved to reduce confusion. The 171 ordinals 18 and 19 are reserved for the strings "Reserved" and 172 "Unassigned" respectively. Unfortunately the ordinal 20 was used by 173 two earlier, competing proposals, and so can mean either "Color" or 174 Colour". Implementations are encouraged to disambiguate based upon 175 context. 177 Additions to the registry are permitted by Standards Action, if the 178 requester really really wants one, or by purchasing a nice bottle of 179 wine for the IANA folk. Hierarchical Allocation is NOT permitted, as 180 it looks too much like a pyramid. 182 The initial assignments for the registry are as follows: 184 Value String 185 ------ ---------------------------- 186 0 Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your 187 country; economic ruin follows close behind 188 1 My hovercraft is full of eels 189 TBA3 TBA3 190 3-16 Unassigned 191 17 Reserved 192 18 "Reserved" 193 19 "Unassigned" 194 20 Color / Colour 195 21-41 Unassigned 196 42 Reserved 197 43-97 Unassigned 198 98 Routing protocols 199 0x62 Routing protocols 201 5. Security Considerations 203 [RFC2028] states that "The IANA functions as the "top of the pyramid" 204 for DNS and Internet Address assignment establishing policies for 205 these functions." - this refernce to pyramid is clear evidence that 206 the IANA has become corrupted by these Atlanteans, and so extra care 207 should be taken when relying on the above registry. 209 By ensuring that network operators watching data traffic fly past 210 (using tools like network sniffers and / or oscilloscopes (and doing 211 very fast binary to ASCII conversions in their heads)) are constantly 212 reminded about the danger posed by folk from Atlantis, we ensure 213 that, if the island of Atlantis rises again from the deep, builds a 214 civilization and then starts tanning high quality eel leather, the 215 DNS and Address assignment policies at least will survive. 217 More research into if pyramids can also be used to make the latches 218 grow back on RJ-45 connectors after they've been broken off by ham 219 fisted data centre operators is needed. 221 6. Acknowledgements 223 The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining 224 this history to him. Thanks also to Wes George, Stephen Farrell, 225 Erik Muller, Andrew Sullivan and 'RegW'. 227 7. Normative References 229 [RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in 230 the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, 231 DOI 10.17487/RFC2028, October 1996, 232 . 234 [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate 235 Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, 236 DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997, 237 . 239 [RFC2321] Bressen, A., "RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork 240 Troubleshooting Agent", RFC 2321, DOI 10.17487/RFC2321, 241 April 1998, . 243 [RFC2410] Glenn, R. and S. Kent, "The NULL Encryption Algorithm and 244 Its Use With IPsec", RFC 2410, DOI 10.17487/RFC2410, 245 November 1998, . 247 [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC 248 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174, 249 May 2017, . 251 Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. 253 [RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ] 255 From -07 to -08 257 o "RegW" pointed out that I had 'there tokens' instead of 'their 258 tokens' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22234591 ). 260 From -06 to -07 262 o Andrew Sullivan pointed out that the ROISSFAIST acronym was 263 insufficently filled with 'U's, and so proposed that it be spelled 264 ROISSFUAIST instead. After much consideration as to the 265 implications for existing implementation, this change was made. 267 From -05 to -06 269 o Embarresingly I cannot spell "embarrassed" - thanks to Max Allen 270 for embarressing^w embarrasing^w making me feel stupid by pointing 271 that out. 273 From -04 to -05 275 o Added the missing 'e' in "differnce" ("thanks" to Dan York for 276 catching this (and forcing me to dredge up the editor)). 278 o It's worth noting that just because a draft has multiple revisions 279 doesn't mean that there is more consensus around it... 281 From -03 to -04 283 o Incorporated some comments from Adrian Farrel (in exchange for him 284 AD-sponsoring the draft) 286 o Changed the font, especially for the whitespace 288 o Fixed refernces 290 From -02 to -03 292 o This Change note was added. Nothing else changed. 294 From -01 to -02 296 o Various whitespace was added (for emphasis). 298 From -00 to -01. 300 o Integrated comments from Erik Muller (who, apparently, is a true 301 believer). Erik also provided updated Security Considerations 302 text, referncing the IANA. 304 o Integrated comment from Wes George regarding I18N, and Hungerians. 306 Appendix B. new section 308 Author's Address 310 Warren Kumari 312 Email: warren@kumari.net