Subject: Re: [Anima-signaling] PEN v domain name [GRASP open issues confirmation]

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2015 14:25:55 +1300

Well, I didn't see any comment on this on the WG list.

There is another approach which avoids the choice and simplifies
the protocol, but adds bits on the wire:

State that an objective's name is ":whatever" if it's generic
and "vendorString:whatever" if it's vendor specific.
The formal definition of vendorString is that it's a unique
UTF-8 string not including ":". The format MAY be an FQDN
and MAY be a PEN (represented as a decimal number).

As far as GRASP is concerned, an objective name is now simply
a string.

Thoughts?

Regards
   Brian

On 24/11/2015 08:34, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>> o2) Private Enterprise Number(PEN) is used to distinguish vendor options. Would a domain name be better?
>>> Consensus: PEN might not make sense for autonomic nodes; domain name might be better.
> 
> The point here is that some GRASP objectives will be standardised and their
> names will be in an IANA registry; they don't need either a PEN or a domain name.
> 
> Other objectives will be non-standardised; we call them "vendor" options but of
> course they could be private in any way, open-source, or whatever. However, to
> make them unique, they need some tag that is guaranteed to be unique, which means
> we need to pick something that is registered somewhere. The two obvious choices
> are PEN numbers or domain names.
> 
> PEN numbers (draft-liang-iana-pen) are fixed length (32 bit) integers introduced
> for SNMP (but with no dependency on SNMP), allocated FCFS at no cost. This morning,
> there are 46768 of them allocated.
> 
> Domain names are variable length strings. They cost money to obtain and maintain.
> They can vanish or be re-assigned.
> 
>>From a GRASP efficiency point of view, I think that 32 bit integers are marginally
> better.
> 
> Regards
>    Brian
>