Document: draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-26.txt
From: Brian E Carpenter 
Date: 1 december 2004 

Summary: About ready for DS, but my point on Appendix E looks like a
small bug, and there are nits.

Ow, ow, OWW! You're asking me to review a 100 page draft by our three
top routing gurus that affects the viablility of the whole Internet.
OK... but I trust Yakov, Tony and Sue a lot more than I trust myself
and so I assume that technically, this is fundamentally OK.

Substantive:
------------

The longer Abstract includes this:

>    This specification covers only the exchange of IP version 4 network
>    reachability information.

I think it would be appropriate to point to RFC 2858 for IPv6 at this 
point.
It's in the Non-normative references, but not cited.

 > 4.2 OPEN Message Format
...
>       My Autonomous System:
>          This 2-octet unsigned integer indicates the Autonomous System
>          number of the sender.

I think it would be better if AS Number was defined earlier, in the
definitions. But more substantially, I would expect a brief discussion
of the fact that this is a 16 bit field... that seems to be a recurrent
topic.

> Appendix E.  TCP options that may be used with BGP
...
>    If a local system TCP user interface supports setting of the DSCP
>    field [RFC2474] for TCP connections, then the TCP connection used by
>    BGP SHOULD be opened with bits 0-2 of the DSCP field set to 110
>    (binary).

I'm a bit unhappy with this. It is a specific feature of RFC 2474 that
the DSCP bits are *not* encoded and that only all 6 bits as a unit
have meaning. I believe the correct statement would be

    If a local system TCP user interface supports setting of the DSCP
    field [RFC2474] for TCP connections, then the TCP connection used by
    BGP SHOULD be opened with the DSCP field set to Class Selector 6,
    i.e. 110000 binary.

This reflects the guidance in draft-baker-diffserv-basic-classes-04.txt

> IANA Considerations

This should probably also have a reference to the AS Number registry.


Editorial:
----------

* The Abstract occurs twice, before and after the table of contents. 
The first
version seems a bit long to me, and would perhaps be better positioned
as an Introduction.

* In the middle of the Non-normative References there is a useless line:
> 3563 Cooperative Agreement Between the ISOC/IETF and ISO/IEC Joint

* I wonder why the Security and IANA Considerations are positioned
as unnumbered sections after the Appendices?

* The denitter is not happy - there are some boilerplate
discrepancies, and various formatting errors:

idnits 1.51

tmp/draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-26.txt:

   Checking nits according to http://www.ietf.org/ID-Checklist.html:

     Checking conformance with RFC 3667/3668 boilerplate...

     * The document claims conformance with section 10 of RFC 2026, but 
uses
       some RFC 3667/3668 boilerplate.  As RFC 3667/3668 replaces 
section 10 of
       RFC 2026, you should not claim conformance with it if you have 
changed
       to using RFC 3667/3668 boilerplate.

     The document seems to lack an RFC 3667 Section 5.4 Copyright Notice
     -- however, there's a paragraph with a matching beginning.
     Boilerplate error?

     (... it does have an RFC 2026 Section 10.4(C) Copyright Notice.)
     The document seems to lack an RFC 3667 Section 5.5 Disclaimer --
     however, there's a paragraph with a matching beginning. Boilerplate
     error?

     The document seems to lack an RFC 3668 Section 5, para 1 IPR
     Disclosure Acknowledgement
     The document seems to lack an RFC 3668 Section 5, para 2 IPR
     Disclosure Acknowledgement
     The document seems to lack an RFC 3668 Section 5, para 3 IPR
     Disclosure Invitation
     There are 101 instances of too long lines in the document,

     -- the longest one being 10 characters in excess of 72.


   Checking nits according to 
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-guidelines.txt:

     The document seems to lack a 1id_guidelines paragraph about 6 months
     document validity -- however, there's a paragraph with a matching
     beginning. Boilerplate error?

     The document seems to lack a 1id_guidelines paragraph about the list
     of current Internet-Drafts -- however, there's a paragraph with a
     matching beginning. Boilerplate error?

     The page length should not exceed 58 lines per page -
	  but there was 100 longer pages, the longest (page 53) being 79 lines
     It seems as if not all pages are separated by form feeds -
	  found 0 form feeds but 100 pages

   Miscellaneous warnings:

     There are 216 instances of lines with hyphenated line breaks in the 
document.
     Line 385 has weird spacing: '...setting  any B...'
     Line 2105 has weird spacing: '... system  autom...'
     Line 2992 has weird spacing: '...rom the  under...'
     Line 4122 has weird spacing: '...hen all  the d...'
     Line 4262 has weird spacing: '...y, each  key a...'

     Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information.