Constantine,

On May 6, 2014, at 4:15 PM, Constantine A. Murenin <muren...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Protocol 112 was assigned by IANA for VRRP in 1998.
>> 
>> When did OpenBSD choose to squat on 112?
> 
> If you don't use it, you lose it.

Are you suggesting no one is running VRRP? Surprising given RFC 5798.

By the way, according to Wikipedia, it would seem the OpenBSD developers 
decided to squat on 112 in 2003, 5 years after 112 was assigned.

> There are only so many protocol numbers; out of those potentially
> available and non-conflicting,

Yes. That is exactly why most responsible and professional developers work with 
IANA to obtain the assignments they need instead of intentionally squatting on 
numbers, particularly numbers known to be already assigned.

> it was deemed the best choice to go
> with the protocol number that was guaranteed to be useless otherwise.

Except it wasn't useless: it was, in fact, in use by VRRP.  Further, the 
OpenBSD developers chose to squat on 240 for pfsync - a number that has not yet 
been allocated.  If the OpenBSD developers were so concerned about making the 
best choice, it seems odd they chose an allocated number for one protocol and 
an unallocated number for another protocol.

To be honest, it would seem from appearances that OpenBSD's use of 112 was 
deemed a "cute" (that is, unprofessional and irresponsible) way for the OpenBSD 
developers to say 'screw you' to the IETF, IANA, Cisco, network operators, etc. 
The fact that OpenBSD developers continue to defend this choice is one reason 
why I won't run OpenBSD (or CARP).

> Any complaints for Google using the https port 443 for SPDY?

AFAIK, the use of SPDY does not preclude the use of HTTPS on the same network. 
The fact that in addition to the OpenBSD developers choosing to use 112, they 
also chose to use the MAC addresses used for VRRP, thus making it impossible to 
run both VRRP and CARP on the same network due to MAC address conflicts would 
suggest you might want to pick a better analogy.

Regards,
-drc

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