Mohsen BANAN wrote:
Complaints Against The IESG
and The RFC-Editor
About Publication of RFC-2188 (ESRO)
Mohsen Banan
mohsen at neda.com
November 5, 1998
I suppose I should make a note to this, since I was apps AD at the time:
I think ESRO is a badly designed protocol that would have been harmful
to the Internet if it had ever been deployed at scale.
The IESG pointed some of the issues out to the RFC Editor, who handled
the communication with the author; that was the procedure at that time.
Nevertheless, the RFC Editor felt that the document was worthy of
publication, and published anyway.
The IESG note put on this document says:
IESG Note
This protocol has not had the benefit of IETF Working Group review,
but a cursory examination reveals several issues which may be
significant issues for scalability. A site considering deployment
should conduct a careful analysis to ensure they understand the
potential impacts.
That's more or less consistent with the now-standard note put on all RFC
Editor independent submissions, but at that time, it was an unusually
strong statement.
Of course, it was far milder than the one put on the EMSD spec, RFC
2524, published in February 1999:
IESG Note
The protocol specified in this document may be satisfactory for
limited use in private wireless IP networks. However, it is
unsuitable for general-purpose message transfer or for transfer of
messages over the public Internet, because of limitations that
include the following:
- Lack of congestion control
EMSD is layered on ESRO [RFC 2188], which does not provide
congestion control. This makes EMSD completely unsuitable for
end-to-end use across the public Internet. EMSD should be
considered for use in a wireless network only if all EMSD email
exchanged between the wireless network and the public Internet
will transit an EMSD<->SMTP gateway between the two regions.
- Inadequate security
The document specifies only clear-text passwords for
authentication. EMSD should be used across a wireless network
only if sufficiently strong encryption is in use to protect the
clear-text password.
- Lack of character set internationalization
EMSD has no provision for representation of characters outside of
the ASCII repertoire or for language tags.
- Poorly defined gatewaying to and from Internet Mail
Because Internet Mail and EMSD have somewhat different and
conflicting service models and different data models, mapping
between them may provide good service only in limited cases, and
this may cause operational problems.
The IESG therefore recommends that EMSD deployment be limited to
narrow circumstances, i.e., only to communicate with devices that
have inherent limitations on the length and format of a message (no
more than a few hundred bytes of ASCII text), using either:
a. wireless links with adequate link-layer encryption and gatewayed
to the public Internet, or
b. a private IP network that is either very over-provisioned or has
some means of congestion control.
In the near future, the IESG may charter a working group to define an
Internet standards-track protocol for efficient transmission of
electronic mail messages, which will be highly compatible with
existing Internet mail protocols, and which wil be suitable for
operation over the global Internet, including both wireless and wired
links.
In this case, too, the RFC Editor exercised the RFC Editor's independent
judgment and published the document.
The Internet seems to have survived the publication, but I can't see any
tangible benefit to the Internet from their publication either.
WRT formalities, Google found this reply to the posting of the note:
http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg08332.html
which seems to indicate that the IAB archives should show what happened
afterwards; the mailing list also had a followup discussion that might
be of interest.
This was eight years ago. The IESG that the complaint was made against was:
Alvestrand, Harald Applications
Bradner, Scott Transport
Burgan, Jeff Internet
Curran, John Operations & Management
Halpern, Joel Routing
Moore, Keith Applications
Narten, Thomas Internet
O'Dell, Michael Operations & Management
Reynolds, Joyce User Services
Romanow, Allyn Transport
Schiller, Jeff Security
What's the point of reposting this message now?
Harald
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