On 12/2/2011 8:50 PM, Ross Callon wrote:
If a customer uses a CGN-specific allocation on the inside of
their network as if it were RFC 1918 space, then, yes, they will
have trouble if they ever use a provider that uses a CGN.
Thanks. So my point is, this proposed allocation doesn't solve
anything, it just kicks the can down the road a while. That's not
enough benefit to justify the cost.
This particular argument has been bothering me for a while.
We write standards. Our RFCs that specify protocols or best current
practices contain statements along the lines of MUST or MUST NOT (and
yes other documents also may use this terminology). People who
implement or who deploy products could at least in principle ignore
some of these statements, and implement or deploy equipment in ways
that violate the MUST and MUST NOT statements in our documents. When
they do this, bad things may happen.
This is not a valid reason for us to stop writing standards, nor to
stop putting MUST statements in our standards.
To a certain extent of course you're right. But that's not the question
before us. This is a resource allocation question. More particularly,
it's a scarce resource, and making that allocation will have costs. So
it's incumbent on us to do a cost::benefit analysis to determine whether
the benefits of doing the allocation justify the costs. (I'm not trying
to talk down to anyone here, I'm just repeating what I think we all know
in order to take the conversation out of the abstract world that you're
describing and put it back into the concrete world of this particular
question.)
So in regards to this particular resource allocation in order to
determine what should be on the benefit side of the ledger we ask
ourselves the question, "Will this allocation solve the problem that it
attempts to solve?" (Note, I'm purposely ignoring the preliminary
questions, such as, "Is this a problem we _want_ to solve?") The answer,
for better or worse, is "No." Doing the allocation will postpone the
pain, until such time as those folks that we keep hearing have exhausted
all of 1918 internally catch on, and then start using this block as 1918
space.
So because the benefits of doing the allocation are spotty at best, and
the cost is high, we shouldn't do it.
Q.E.D.
Doug
--
"We could put the whole Internet into a book."
"Too practical."
Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/
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