RE: draft-arberg-pppoe-mtu-gt1492-00

> From: "Peter Arberg" <[email protected]>

> I'm glad you got that out of your system Karl, but now let us
> try and reset the discussion, and deal with some reality.

Yes, let's.  For the many years that I've known them, Karl and Jim
been be too willing to suffer foolishness.  I suspect that what they
are really thinking is vastly stronger than what you have probably
understood from their gentle words.


> PPPoE might be a bad idea, but it is very real, and a large percentage
> of the top 100 carriers in the world are using it today, and a lot of
> them will continue to use it for a long time to come, and as such it
> is only natural that PPPoE requirements evolve over time.

Those facts do not in any way justify standardizing something that
will have even more interoperability problems that the original PPPoE.
The IETF is not a vanity publish house.  It exists only to minimize
and prevent interoperability problems.


> Sine PPPoE was made an informational RFC back in 1999, at least
> in my mind, will say that IETF and as such the pppext working group is
> the right place to discuss enhancements to the protocol.

That reasoning might justify moving all of IEEE's work to the IETF,
since there are RFCs that are standards instead of mere Informational
documents.  Still, if your proposal required changing only IETF
documents, this would be the right place.  However, you have
consistently ignored the point that your proposal depends on changes
in IEEE standards.


> The draft-arberg-pppoe-mtu-gt1492-00 is in no way looking to be on
> the standard track, it is intended to become an informational RFC to
> tell people what is deployed and doable today in carriers networks.

The IETF has been trying in recent years to reduce the incidence
of disasters like PPPoE by requiring technical review of even
Informational RFCs.  Unless you can get some consensus that your
proposal has sufficient technical merit and is unlikely to cause
harm, you might and certainly should have problems getting it
published even as an Informational RFC, at least not without some
of the "DANGER DO NOT IMPLEMENT OR EVEN READ THIS!" warnings that
James Carlson has suggested.


> It is a lot easier if different carriers and vendors have a common
> document to base their discussion on.

The IETF has no monopoly on printing presses.  Be honest about what
you are doing and admit that you don't merely want to publish a document
for discussion.  If that's all you wanted to do, you could have done
it on your own web site.  Having had an I-D published would also be
sufficient if you only wanted to float some ideas.  What you are really
doing is what many people have done and many more have tried to do.
That is to get the IETF's imprimatur on a protocol.  You will then go
to other vendors, carriers, and even the IEEE and say "The IETF has
approved this changed as you can see from RFC 98765, so you must go
along with it."


Vernon Schryver    [email protected]

_______________________________________________
Pppext mailing list
[email protected]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/pppext