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RE: I'm not the microphone police, but ...

2005-08-02 17:55:33
There are cases where it is useful for a group to be able to take notice
of first hand experience that comes from employment.

For example I am currently reading a somewhat sureal thread in which an
individual who clearly has no experience or understanding of running
network operations for a large ISP (million plus customers) is lecturing
folk on the lack of scalability of a protocol proposed by and already
deployed by several ISPs of that type of scale.

Another issue that frequently comes up is that people will assert that a
proposal to make a new use of DNS will increase load on the system and
thus risk bringing down core DNS and thus the Internet. Except in cases
where the protocol is catastrophically bad and unnecessarily wasteful of
resources these dire predictions have never yet proved true, nor are
they likely to - most load on the core DNS is due to attacks and baddly
configured DNS systems. Even if the load on the core DNS were to
increase the point of the infrastructure is to serve the needs of users,
not the other way around.


The point I am trying to make here is that we are not dealing with a
domain that is entirely academic theory. There are cases where
operational experience is significant and affiliation can carry
significance.

If I hear several major infrastructure providers say that they have
examined a proposal and the resource requirements do not cause them
concern as far as their operations go I think it is reasonable to give
such a statement considerable weight unless there are very good reasons
to think otherwise.

Likewise I would take a concern raised by several major infrastructure
providers that a proposal did have unacceptable resource requirements
very seriously, although I would want to see some documentation and
explanation of the claim.

We do not need to give a veto to major infrastructure providers but
there has to be a mechanism that allows companies to raise issues on the
record from time to time when they choose. If only to avoid the need to
argue at interminable length why a 'scalability issue' is nothing of the
sort.

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