Geoff, Randy,
Having reflected on your comments, I think that the two of you may be
approaching the same problem from two directions. I will try my best to
articulate the problem. When we agree that we have a common understanding of
the problem, we can decide whether to fix draft-bonica or abandon it.
Geoff points out that each of the entries mentioned in draft-bonica can be
characterized as one of the following:
- a special purpose address assignment
- a address reservation
All compliant IP implementations must respect special purpose address
assignments. As Randy puts it, special purpose address assignments should be
baked into IP stacks.
However, the same is not true of address reservations. While operators may
afford special treatment to packets that are sourced from or destined to
reserved addresses, these treatments should not be baked into IP
implementations. They should be configurable.
Currently, there is nothing in draft-bonica that distinguishes between special
purpose address assignments and address reservations. If we were to continue
with this draft, we would have to add a field that makes this distinction.
Having added that field, we should also make clear that that field, and only
that field, determines whether an address should be baked into IP stacks?
Randy, Geoff, have I restated the problem accurately?
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Ron Bonica
vcard: www.bonica.org/ron/ronbonica.vcf