Alia,
Hope everyone enjoyed the holidays.
Responses in-line below…
From: Alia Atlas [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2015 5:29 PM
To: Eric Gray
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected];
[email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [RTG-DIR] Routing directorate review of
draft-ietf-i2rs-problem-statement
Importance: High
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your review. I really appreciate it.
On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 8:33 PM, Eric Gray
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello,
I have been selected as the Routing Directorate reviewer for this draft.
The Routing Directorate seeks to review all routing or routing-related
drafts as they pass through IETF last call and IESG review, and sometimes
on special request.
The purpose of the review is to provide assistance to the Routing ADs.
For more information about the Routing Directorate, please see:
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/area/rtg/trac/wiki/RtgDir
Although these comments are primarily for the use of the Routing ADs, it
would be helpful if you could consider them along with any other IETF
Last Call comments that you receive, and strive to resolve them through
discussion or by updating the draft.
Document: draft-ietf-i2rs-problem-statement
Reviewer: Eric Gray
Review Date: 12/16/2014
Intended Status: Informational
Summary: I have some minor concerns about this document that I think
should be resolved before before publication. The document has nits
that should also be considered prior to publication.
Minor Issues:
==========
Section 5 title is "Desired Aspects of ..." but the first sentence talks about
"required aspects ..." I believe that the authors should be consistent.
Keeping required
The actual "key aspects needed" are a mixture or required and desired
behaviors. Because the draft does not refer to RFC 2119 terminology,
it is not clear if this is intended or a result of narrative style choices.
I'm not sure which ones you are reading as desired vs. required. The intent
is that all are required; trade-offs do happen.
Changing the section title helps. The issues that remain are less significant
when considered as “aspects to be considered.”
I wanted to avoid being pedantic, but one example (now more minor) is as
follows:
- 1st paragraph uses the phrase “describes required aspects”
- the 1st list item (multiple simultaneous asynchronous operations),
however, says that a single application should be able to …
Without the reference to RFC 2119, “should” may be ambiguously interpreted
according to standard English as something likely but not required.
I think what was probably meant in this case is that protocol is required to
support applications that perform multiple concurrent operations (which is
something we believe applications should be able to do).
The current text is not explicit about this as a protocol requirement, if that
is
what is intended, instead making the protocol requirement implicit based on
the way that we believe applications would likely use it.
There are similar issues with “High Throughput”, “Low Latency” and “Multi-
Channel.”
One advantage of referring to RFC 2119 is it makes “should” less ambiguous,
and defines this term (and other terms) as “requirement levels.”
But I am okay with leaving this as is, because of the heading change. Most
people will be able to figure out what is meant, eventually. ☺
If the terminology is meant to be interpreted according to RFC 2119,
then this should be added as a reference. Otherwise, perhaps the title
of the section should be changed to:
"Aspects to be Considered in Designing Protocol for I2RS"
Yes, slightly tweaked to
"Aspects to be Considered for an I2RS Protocol"
since I2RS is expecting to modify an existing protocol rather than design
a new one.
D’accord.
In this section, in addition to "Secure Control" we may want to suggest
similar "Secure Access." Information about routing may be useful to an
attacker for other forms of attack than direct control.
True - just updated the bullet to be "Secure Control and Access".
The content now reads:
" Any ability to manipulate routing state must be subject to authentication
and
authorization. Sensitive routing information may also need to
be provided via secure access back to the I2RS client. Such
communications must be integrity protected. Some communications
will also require confidentiality.
"
D’accord.
Section 8 ("Security Considerations") - Minimally, this section should
point to security aspects mentioned in the preceding section.
Done and extended
D’accord.
Note that this section mentions "extraction of detailed router state"
which is one form of access that may both require that requests
are authenticated and that information may not be intercepted.
NITS:
====
In the Introduction, second line of the first paragraph, "With scale ..."
should start a new paragraph to be consistent with the next paragraph.
eh, not worried about the consistency given it would leave the first paragraph
with one sentence.
Single-sentence paragraphs are quite common.
See, for instance the earlier paragraph in the latest draft that reads “This
draft
will expire on July 10, 2015.”
Again, I was trying to avoid pedanticism. Sigh.
More important in either prose or specification is that a paragraph represents a
single block/concept in whatever it is you are trying to construct.
Even in prose, if you have an opening sentence that introduces two things you
want to talk about, then either both of them or neither of them should be in
the same paragraph. For prose, this is mostly about flow.
In specification, it is slightly more important. A reader who is skimming the
introductory text before plowing into the salient parts of the specification is
likely to actually miss the point you’re making about scale because it’s buried
in the paragraph that introduces issues with both scale and complexity.
If scale were important, it probably would be in a separate paragraph.
Of course, you could (in prose anyway) do this deliberately as a way to place
greater emphasis on the second point, sort of along the following lines:
“There are two major kinds of ideas that we can expect to encounter in our
discussions: good ideas and bad ideas. Bad ideas are obviously something
we want to quickly dispense with.
“Good ideas, on the other hand, should be …”
In my opinion, use of this sort of literary device in a specification would be
just
a bit inappropriate. If the text is not worth emphasis, leave it out.
In the appendix the first paragraph should probably end in much the
same way as the second paragraph, i.e. -
"CLI Standardization is not considered as a candidate solution for the
I2RS."
It is not clear what we are trying to say in saying "I2RS does not involve
CLI Standardization."
Sure - changed.
Thanks again,
Alia
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