Re: [IPFIX] Application of IPFIX to new application spaces.

Brian Trammell <[email protected]> Fri, 3 Jan 2014 10:39:22 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.ietf.ipfix
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
hi Stewart,

Wanted to reply briefly to two points here inline (will reply in more detail later):

On 02 Jan 2014, at 14:54, Stewart Bryant <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Whilst I accept that IPFIX is pretty much complete in terms of
> addressing it's original goals as a network management
> protocol, I have some concerns about it's completeness
> as an  observation reporting protocol. I think these need
> to be addressed, before declaring completion of the work
> programme as a whole.
> 
> (In my own time) I am looking at the definition of a protocol
> to observe and report the radio noise floor. The purpose
> is to map the rise in the radio noise floor due to RF pollution
> from domestic and industrial digital systems such as
> plasma televisions, and power line (digital) transmission
> systems. IPFIX is a good protocol for such mass observations,
> and has been used successfully in the radio propagation
> monitoring system pskreporter.
> 
> In doing this I ran into two problems, firstly there are no
> experimental IE types, and thus I cannot prototype the
> application without either "camping" on a set of IEs, or
> waiting until I am allocated a PEN.

I’m a little puzzled about the hesitation about getting a PEN; indeed, in my experience, had you applied for a PEN for this purpose when you sent this message initially you’d have one by now. There is a little overhead in managing PEN space for different experiments (see https://trammell.ch/pen-35566 for the range registry used for my own experimentation) but this is orders of magnitude less work than designing and implementing the IEs in the first place.

I could see this being a problem if one were trying to run many experiments within the same very large organization with undefined or draconian processes for reserving an enterprise-specific IE. But PEN space is 2^32-1 large and we haven;t even exhausted the first block of 2^16, so “get a new PEN and label it useful for a given experiment” is probably an acceptable way out of this quandary.

> For reasons that will
> be clear from other work I have done in the IETF, I dislike
> the idea of "camping" on code-points. This makes it clear
> to me that we need a small, but not trivial set of
> experimental IEs that are intended for prototyping but
> explicitly excluded from use in production systems.
> This needs to be a reasonable number since a new application
> space might need a fair number of IEs to be practical.
> Thus I think that we need to either allocate some of the
> base protocol IEs to experimental, or to have IANA
> allocate a PEN specifically to experimental use which
> would allow experimentation in new applications spaces
> without the need to formally allocate IEs in either the
> base IE space, or the PEN space of the organization
> (or person) conducting the experiment.

I agree in principle that allocating a single “IPFIX Experimentation” PEN would be one solution to this problem, but it would have to be fairly tightly scoped (only for experimental use among EPs and CPs implemented and deployed by a single entity within the scope of a single experiment; MUST be logged as an error by CPs in production use). And I’d be very concerned that we were basically inviting people to camp on a whole new code space — requiring experiments to use their own PEN space at least keeps experimental IEs that “leak” into production from colliding with each other, provided that the PEN owner manages their own space competently.

> The second problem that I see is the lack of a public registry
> for non-network managements applications. Specifically
> I am going to need "callsign", "maidenhead locator",
> "frequency", "noise power", maybe "field strength", "receiver type"
> etc. Now some of those may be of general use (frequency)
> but most of them would be cruft in the base protocol IE set
> which is set up for networking applications. On the other hand,
> I know of at least one PEN space that will have a number of the
> terms I need already defined, although these are by
> definition private. With the current IE registration structure
> the absence of a public registry inevitably means the
> redefinition of other than mainstream/network management
> terms across a number of private registries. I thus think
> it would be useful to introduce a PEN + registry for
> "other applications" or introduce the concept of a series
> of application specific registries with appropriate  PENs to
> identify the application space rather than  the private
> enterprise space.

This seems like a very good idea. I’ll have to think about it some more.

Thanks, cheers,

Brian

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