Subject: [Gen-art] Gen-ART review of draft-ietf-pim-proposed-req-01.txt

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 04:26:07 +0800

Background for those on the CC list, who may be unaware of GenART:
GenART is the Area Review Team for the General Area of the IETF.  We
advise the General Area Director (i.e. the IETF/IESG chair) by providing
more in depth reviews than he could do himself of documents that come up
for final decision in IESG telechat.  I was selected as the GenART
member to review this document.  Below is my review, which was written
specifically with an eye to the GenART process, but since I believe that
it will be useful to have these comments more widely distributed, others
outside the GenART group are being copied.

One fairly serious question, which probably applies to the new PIM-SM draft,
but the text is here, so I'm mentioning it here - I assume that RFC 1264
applies in this case (routing protocol going for proposed standard), which
says (in Section 3.0),

 5) There must be evidence that all features of the protocol have
    been tested, running between at least two implementations.  This
    must include that all of the security features have been
    demonstrated to operate, and that the mechanisms defined in the
    protocol actually provide the intended protection.

but draft-ietf-pim-proposed-req-01.txt names three implementations in
section 2.5 (Evidence of testing), and the statements for Cisco and Procket 
say

 Cisco

    The Cisco implementation has undergone extensive laboratory
    testing as well as testing in production deployments. It is found
    to interoperate with implementations of earlier versions of the
    PIM Sparse-Mode protocol specification.

 Procket Networks

    The Procket Networks implementation was deployed in many research
    and service provider networks and showed interoperability with new
    and old Cisco Systems implementations as well as Juniper Networks
    implementations.

This didn't seem to say "all features have been tested."

I defer to the ADs on this, and if the text is sufficient, my apologies for
asking - this is the first Gen-ART review I've done while looking at RFC
1264, so I'm not up on "prior art", especially for multicast routing.

If this is OK, the document is just about ready for publication. There are
nits:

  Checking nits according to http://www.ietf.org/ID-Checklist.html:
  * The document seems to lack an Abstract section.
  * The document seems to lack a Security Considerations section.
  * The document seems to lack an IANA Considerations section.

But the Abstract could easily be the first sentence or two from the
Introduction, and the Security and IANA Considerations are almost certainly
"No considerations apply to a requirements analysis about a routing
protocol, only to a specification for that routing protocol", or some such.

The IPR statements are outdated, but that's easily corrected (if necessary,
again, I defer to the ADs).

I was surprised that there was no formal reference, normative or
informative, to exactly WHAT the "(new) PIM Sparse-Mode protocol
specification" actually is - was this an oversight? But, if so, again it is
easily corrected.

Thanks,

Spencer 

_______________________________________________
Gen-art mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/gen-art