Well, one fairly good indicator of a clueless person is when they insist that
things have to be a certain way, but seem unwilling or unable to explain why.
...
That's all fine, except that it would be more accurate without the words
starting with "but..." People who absolutely positively know they are
right never are. Being certain you right is the second best defense
against being penetrated by clues. (The best defense is being dead.)
Perhaps the person being so accused should simply say "my customer insists
on this. I can't tell you who he is, and I can't amplify on his reasons for
insisting on this."
To which the reply should be "then your customer needs to represent his own
needs here. Because the solution your customer insists on causes problems,
and without actually having some insight into your customer's real
requirements, we have no basis on which to try to build a compromise."
Once upon a time there was an ad hoc group that hashed out interoperable
network protocols based on consensus, but generally did not try to impose
its view of right or wrong. The group was filled with sentiments along
the lines of "let the market decide." The group had many academic ties,
but knew better than to try to require any tha participant disclose
anything secret. This was partly because the incumbant official
standards condemned as completely wrong, unworkable, and heretical
everything the ad hoc group was doing, and it would have been silly for
the ad hoc group to dictate anything. Then the group became powerful
and infected with delusions of grandeur, omnipotence, and provincialism.
Forever after, or until the next ad hoc group with incomplete pretensions,
it grew increasingly insane and like the older organizations it used to
decry for reasons other than turf wars.
In other words, what happened to the old IETF that would have said
"Site local addresses are utterly stupid and wrong; how large a
block did you say you wanted?" Where are the old IETF vendors and
other outfits that if told "No, we will not let you have site local
addresses" would have said "Ok, give us a block and by the way, if
I were you, I'd filter routes and packets carrying those addresses."
Isn't that only a slighty bent picture of how the SAP addresses
used for IP on 802 networks came about?
What happened is that they all turned into a bunch of provincial amateur
lawyers, each utterly convinced of omniscience, and with no designing,
implementing, or debugging to do, since otherwise they'd be doing it
instead of spending time writing legalistic appeals and decisions.
This is all utterly silly. If some outfit decides it must have site
local addresses for any notion of the phrase, it will get them. The
most you can do is brand sight local anathema and reasonably expect
that pointy haired "IT" bosses will not use them until there is a real
need that overcomes the political risks of violating an oh fish all
fur shure standard.
Just for my own ignorance, how are you going to outlaw the use of
::ffff:10.0.0.0/104 in the bright new IPv6 world? Why won't
existing uses of site local addresses be grandfathered?
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com