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Re: [IETF] Not Listening to the Ops Customer

2013-06-02 09:16:39


--On Saturday, June 01, 2013 11:28 -0400 Warren Kumari
<warren(_at_)kumari(_dot_)net> wrote:

...
I *really* want to make sure that my CEO always gets the same
address, and want him to be assigned specific DNS servers and
use a certain gateway. The folk who manage the DHCP are the
"Internal Services Infrastructure Group"  (aka "The windows
monkeys") and I'm sure as heck not giving them access to my
router to twiddle knobs on it.  

Warren, I sympathize.   But I also note that your comment above
can be read, in more general form, as "the folks in IT are
turkeys and therefore we need to export the issues they can't be
trusted to handle well to the Internet".  That isn't a good
model, if only because it involves moving the intelligence to
the middle of the net.  

Assuming that you still work where I think you work, you've got
a significant advantage over most of the people in similar
circumstances: you have an Executive Chairman and a bunch of VPs
who actually do understand the problem with incompetent internal
IT departments and maybe even why they come out that way and
many of them are pretty accessible.  Identify the problem and
suggest a workable solution.

...
It turns out that as soon as you envisage a network in which
some nodes only support 32 bit addresses and other nodes
can't get a globally unique 32 bit address, you are forced
into a world of hurt that requires some combination of NAT,
tunnels and dual-stack. That is completely independent of the
design of IPng, and we knew it 1994.

Yes, hindsight always makes things *much* clearer. It also
provides a nice sandbox to stand on….

But the "knew it in 1994" part means that this is _not_
hindsight.  Several of the other comments we have made aren't
either -- they were well-understood in the community in 1994 and
then rejected or ignored for one reason or another.  One can
complain about the rejection in hindsight, but not about lack of
information.

...
So while your criticism is valid that we collectively came up
with too many such combinations, that collective mistake was
(IMHO) not a result of the design of IPv6 as such. It was more
caused by the design of human beings.


I'd go further -- some of the issue is (IMO) caused by the
consensus driven nature of how we do things. We all have
different sets of interests and different priorities. Because
of a need to achieve consensus, we end in something kind of
like horse-trading. We add features to appease some set of
folk, and compromise on other bits to appease others. I
suspect that if one or two folk had designed this,
soup-to-nuts, we'd have ended up with something cleaner.

See my note about the nature of standards.  

...

    john


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