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Re: How many standards or protocols...

2002-04-16 12:11:04

On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 02:43 , Christian Huitema wrote:
Fine, but Randy is also right when he points out that just because a
spec is not an IETF standard does not mean that the spec is proprietary.

Christian,

        As deployed IS-IS is not fully documented *anyplace*.  What is
actually deployed is not the same as ISO IS-IS, nor is it the same as
RFC-1195, nor are those 2 documents (and a few other more recent
RFCs) sufficient to create an interoperable IS-IS.

        Proprietary is a commonly used term to describe something that does
not have a full, complete, and open specification -- which is the
current state of IS-IS.  Now folks (including me) are trying to fix
that issue by publishing sundry non-standard RFCs on how the as-deployed
IS-IS really works (which effort is to be applauded). But the bottom-line
remains that *today* the as-deployed IS-IS and the documented IS-IS
aren't the same.  I wish they were.

Now the original point was someone else's inaccurate claim that the IETF let both IS-IS and OSPF bloom, when really the IETF originally chose OSPF -- and IS-IS made a separate come-back in the deployed world during the mid-90s.

Cheers,

Ran
rja(_at_)extremenetworks(_dot_)com