Subject: LLMNR consensus statement

From: Ólafur Guðmundsson<[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 18:26:56 -0500

Dear Colleagues,

In http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.2006/msg00028.html
we asked this working group to review the LLMNR
specifications and answer a number of questions.

In this mail we want to address the following: "If we do not get
sufficient feedback on this i.e. fewer than 5 people"

Our assessment is as follows:
- Vixie and Lewis responded with doubts on putting this document on
   standards track. Lewis explicitly stated he did not read the document.
- Sullivan and Borzmeyer explicitly stated they read and supported
   the draft
- Finch only posed a (guiding) question and made no statement
- Thaler supports the document.
- Hall raised a number of security issues and does not seem to
   support publication of the document in its current form.

That means that only Sullivan, Borzmeyer, Thaler, and Hall indicated
that they had read the document in detail which does hardly meet the
set quorum (Aboba clearly read the said doc, but think we do not
include him in the count).

Therefore we propose to Inform the AD that this working group has no
quorum to continue work on this document and that it be published as
an informational document. (Possibly after addressing the issues that
Eric came up with).

We would also like to working group for support to work on DNS and
naming API interfaces, such as are in RFC 3493-bis ,in the light of
DNSSEC, ldap, mdns and llmnr. We would need volunteers to pull this
work.

We are sad we have to ask for this consensus position. Bernard has
been an excellent document editor and we, the chairs and others
involved, should have gauged the quorum for this work earlier, and at
several stages of development. This is not the most elegant end of
this process. If you think there are more elegant ways forward please
let us know.

Our apologies to Bernard and others that have been constructively and
co-operatively working on this document.

--Olafur and Olaf

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From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 15:50:18 -0800

>co-operatively working on this document.

I have great respect for Benard. We worked well together on RFC 3927, and 
I was never happy that in this instance we found ourselves on opposite 
sides of a debate concerning two documents that were very much like two 
twins separated at birth.

I view this as an opportunity to move forward productively, and I welcome 
the prospect of working constructively with Bernard and other interested 
parties to improve draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt. This gives us 
the chance to improve and enhance the protocol currently being used on 
tens of millions of deployed devices, rather than architecting a 
competing document which may well have gone nowhere.

Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
 * Wizard Without Portfolio, Apple Computer, Inc.
 * www.stuartcheshire.org

---

From: "Durand, Alain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2006 22:48:48 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> That means that only Sullivan, Borzmeyer, Thaler, and Hall 
> indicated that they had read the document in detail which 
> does hardly meet the set quorum (Aboba clearly read the said 
> doc, but think we do not include him in the count).

I would really hate to see this work come to an end because
not enough people read the final draft. This would be a shame
On the wg and the IETF as a whole.

Question to the chairs:
If one more person was to speak up, would it help saving the draft?
If the answer is yes, I will commit myself to re-read the document
(I read a version of it not long ago) and pledge support.

   - Alain.

---

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 09:57:12 +0100

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 03:50:18PM -0800,
 Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 31 lines which said:

> I welcome the prospect of working constructively with Bernard and
> other interested parties to improve
> draft-cheshire-dnsext-multicastdns.txt.

The SPF (Sender Policy Framework, for email authentication) people
were always turned down by the IETF when trying to push their protocol
as a RFC, with the reasoning that IETF is not here to "rubber stamp"
any external proprietary protocol, even widely deployed.

> the chance to improve and enhance the protocol currently being used
> on tens of millions of deployed devices, rather than architecting a

Is there somewhere IETF guidance about this issue? Basically, you
suggest that Apple's protocol should be approved by IETF, just because
of prior deployment, which may encourage other people to deploy first
(and think later), in the hope of using the same argument.

In working groups like MARID, there has been a lot of discussion about
the strength of the "prior deployment" argument but I do not remember
a clear conclusion.

---

From: Stuart Cheshire <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:02:44 -0800

>(and think later), in the hope of using the same argument.

I think you misunderstood me.

I was not asking or expecting the IETF to "rubber stamp" anything.

My point was that if there are people who sincerely believe that
our mDNS protocol is doing harm on the network, then working
together to remedy those deficiencies is the path most likely to
achieve the desired result. Issuing a competing RFC in the hope
that it would displace the established protocol "in the wild"
really had about as much chance of succeeding as government-
endorsed OSI had of displacing TCP/IP in the 1990s. Too many
products today already depend on mDNS. If you have a network
printer on your network then you probably already have mDNS on your
network, whether you know it or not -- you can check for yourself by
downloading Bonjour for Windows from <http://www.apple.com/bonjour/>

---

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2006 00:32:50 -0800 (PST)

Stuart Cheshire said:

"I have great respect for Bernard. We worked well together on RFC 3927, 
and I was never happy that in this instance we found ourselves on opposite
sides of a debate concerning two documents that were very much like two
twins separated at birth."

My view is that Stuart and I are actually on the same side -- had the IETF
not intervened I have little doubt that there would be a single multicast
link-local name resolution protocol today, interoperating on all
platforms.  We worked together on RFC 3927, we just recently worked
together on DNAv4, and I look forward to working with Stuart again in the
future.

"This gives us the chance to improve and enhance the protocol currently
being used on tens of millions of deployed devices, rather than architecting a
competing document which may well have gone nowhere."

Given the past history, I have my doubts as to whether the IETF has
anything to contribute here, even in terms of "improving" or
"enhancing" mDNS.  More likely is that the IETF will not standardize
any specifications; it is even possible that no documents will be published
as RFCs.  That's not a very satisfactory end to a process that began seven
years ago at the  Networking in the Small (NITS) BOF at IETF 44 in
Minneapolis in March 1999.