A 100.000 foot perspective on "what is the problem"

[Jonathan Rosenberg]

Melinda Shore wrote:
>>I concur. We need to have an architecture (or architectures) to guide =
>>our efforts, so we can make good use of the resources we have available.
> 
> 
> Boy, I don't know about this.  One of midcom's deliverables
> (more than one, actually, but that's another matter) has
> some serious architectural problems that were spelled out in
> detail in an IAB document.  Our draft was modified to answer
> those issues, but it's my general sense that it was seen
> more as an exercise to complete to get the document
> published than it was a reflection of an abiding concern for
> architecture.

Thats not true at all.

Melinda, engineering is not a discipline of absolutes. There is no such 
thing as an architectural nirvana. Engineering is about the art and 
science of tradeoffs. A good engineer is one that understands the 
various axes involved in a tradeoff, and objectively weighs them against 
each other.

In the instance you are discussing (RFC 3424, IAB Considerations for 
UNSAF, and the midcom deliverable, draft-ietf-midcom-stun), the IAB 
helped clarify the impacts of these tradeoffs, and I think it was valuable.

However, I concluded, and so did many others, that the potential 
benefits of the technology outweiged its deficiencies. Its benefits 
included allowing a bunch of applications to work simply, at low cost, 
maintaining e2e security and interoperability. The alternatives? One was 
to wait for ALGs to get embeded in the cheapo residential NATs, a 
solution which I consider even architecturally worse, or nsis, which is 
the right solution, but probably many, many years away (I'd say about 5) 
from sufficient deployment to be a useful solution.

The relevance of all this to the thread is that, the valuable output 
from IAB was not an architectural pronouncement, but a description of 
issues that arise in a particular direction, to be used as part of the 
engineering process that the working group undertakes. I would like to 
see more of that.

-Jonathan R.


-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                72 Eagle Rock Ave.
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