I think in the end this is an argument about nothing. > This implies that IPv6 nodes SHOULD NOT establish any > flow-specific state unless so instructed by a specific flow state establishment >method. >
What Margaret and itojun refer to are flow state establishment methods that happen to consist of algorithms built into the sending node (rather than signaling mechanisms or pre-configured flow states). These algorithms must avoid duplicate labels, just as signaled or pre-configured methods must. So the sentence is in fact a no-op and can be deleted. While I'm writing, I agree with all of Jarno's other changes. Brian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > >I don't agree with the "SHOULD NOT" above... > > > >There are some potential uses for flow identification that do not rely on > >any sort of flow establishment mechanism or signalling, such as the use of > >flow labels for load balancing. > > > >To have a useful flow label for these mechanisms, an IPv6 node simply labels > >all of the packets in a given TCP/SCTP connection or UDP communication with > >the same flow label,making some basic effort not to re-use flows too often -- > >such as starting with a random number and monotonically increasing it for > >each new connection or communication. > > > >It would be fairly trivial to assign a flow label in this fashion -- not > >much harder than setting it to zero. So, you get a reasonable return for > >very little work. > > I agree with Margaret. KAME has been doing this (automatically > assign flow labels to TCP/connected UDP traffic) for a long time, > so that we can help traffic analysis/diffserv researchers. > (they can't correlate traffic due to the use of ESP, or SSH) > draft-itojun-ipv6-flowlabel-api-01.txt has more details on it. > > itojun -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Brian E Carpenter Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM On assignment at the IBM Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
