Subject: RE: [Ospf-manet] Re: Ospf-manet Digest, Vol 10, Issue 8

From: "Stan Ratliff \(sratliff\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:48:02 -0400

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Henderson, Thomas R [mailto:[email-masked]] 
>Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 3:09 PM
>To: Russ White
>Cc: Bill Fenner; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
>Subject: RE: [Ospf-manet] Re: Ospf-manet Digest, Vol 10, Issue 8
>
> 
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Russ White [mailto:[email-masked]] 
>> Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 6:38 PM
>> To: Richard Ogier
>> Cc: Aniket Desai; [email-masked]
>> Subject: Re: [Ospf-manet] Re: Ospf-manet Digest, Vol 10, Issue 8
>> 
>> 
>> P.S. IMHO, the reason you have "rough consensus" is that most of the
>> people who disagree with this conclusion have been shouted down long
>> enough they no longer care what the IETF does in this area. 
>> This entire
>> argument has driven good technical people out of the process, because
>> they are tired of being pushed aside. That's flat wrong.
>> 
>
>Russ,
>I can't really hold my tongue any longer.  IMO, this experience has
>illustrated some of the worst aspects of IETF:

Amen to that.

>i) WG and ADs agreed to form a design team to find a consensus 
>technical
>approach
>ii) design team tried to set up a level playing field for evaluation
>iii) a consensus (not 100%, but many of the people deeply involved in
>the discussion) emerged on a basic framework for a design, after a lot
>of deliberation and technical work.  
>iv) people who disagreed with the outcome have not been "shouted down",
>rather they have been encouraged to produce independently verifiable
>technical evidence that counters the consensus and what is out there in
>public for review, but they have so far refrained from doing so,
>preferring instead to undermine the process, including ad hominem
>attacks and pleas of victimization.
>

Wow. After hurling this charge, you proceed to engage in what 
I perceive to be an ad hominem attack, while sounding a bit 
like a victim. I would suggest that we all take a deep breath and 
pull back a bit.

>It is really somewhat pathetic that you will sit there and reject
>out-of-hand the work that has been done in full public view, while
>asking everyone to "trust you on it" that you have all of this good
>experimental experience with your approach, but you 
>unfortunately cannot
>share any of it or submit it for independent verification.   

As Phil Spagnolo mentioned in an earlier post, it would seem that 
more than one of us in  the situation where we have an implementation, 
but can't say a lot about it. Again, I see that as more reason to
proceed 
with two, or even three, experimental drafts. 

>How can you
>claim that technical people are driven out of the process when 
>you won't
>even participate technically?  Yet we are supposed to hold up progress
>after years of deliberation because e.g. (as one objector put it to me
>privately) "it just doesn't seem like the right design to me, but I
>can't put my finger on exactly what makes me uncomfortable".  How long
>are we supposed to wait around?
>
>I've been sitting back on this debate for a while now because it is not
>clear to me whether it is worth my time any more; if there will be a
>decision based on technology reasons, I'd be happy to participate
>further, but if the decision is that one vendor has implemented their
>approach and they don't see any reason to switch and will just 
>make sure
>that the outcome will eventually bless it as the standard, why bother?
>

Speaking for myself, I haven't been asking *anyone* to wait around, or 
to "bless" something as a standard. What I *have* been advocating is 
that, due to lack of real-world experience with flooding algorithms, the
WG take the reasonable tack of pursuing *both* (or all three) of the 
proposed solutions, *outside* the confines of a simulator. In my mind, 
it's nothing more, or less,  than the approach taken in other working 
groups, for exactly the same reasons. This would allow us to move 
forward with the proposed solutions, gain real-world experience with 
them, and see which one is better. I don't understand how that does 
anything other than forward the debate, taking it out of the theoretical

and into the real-world.  

Regards,
Stan

>As to your question on why we are trying to make a decision now, it is
>because we were explicitly asked to do so by the AD (Bill) who 
>I believe
>went to the mike in Dallas and told the WG to stop spinning with
>multiple approaches and that "if you do not make a choice, we 
>will, even
>if we have to flip a coin."  So maybe you should take your protests to
>the leadership.
>
>Tom
>
>_______________________________________________
>Ospf-manet mailing list
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>

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---

From: Russ White <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:59:21 -0400

> anything other than forward the debate, taking it out of the theoretical

Thanks, Stan....

I think all of us here in the "opposition" are saying the same thing: We
don't really know the right solution at this point. We should go
experimental, and see what happens.

We might, in the end, find that we need multiple solutions to cover all
network scenarios--if we can live with OSPF and IS-IS, surely we can
live with two extensions to OSPF for MANET.... :-) I just think it's too
early days, right now, to go draft standard on any draft.

:-)

Russ

- --
[email-masked] CCIE <>< Grace Alone

---

From: "Henderson, Thomas R" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:43:03 -0700

Stan,

> From: Stan Ratliff (sratliff) [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 12:48 PM
> To: Henderson, Thomas R; Russ White

It was not an ad hominem attack, it was pointing out that the line of
reasoning was inconsistent.  Let me publicly apologize to Russ if it was
construed as ad hominem and not frustration.

I can tell you (or it should be quite apparent) that I am frustrated
with claims that the process was not fair or that others have been
shouted down.  I feel that people have been quite accommodating, and we
have been waiting recently for more data or implementation code as we
agreed in Dallas, and that it is completely unfair to say that we or
this process is "flat wrong" as Russ stated earlier.  That's what pushed
my button...

> with two, or even three, experimental drafts. 

As I have stated before, I also agree that the OSPF MANET work is in
experimental stage at this point. 

I think the issue is how many experimental drafts are adopted as WG
(one, two, three..).  I have understood the charter of this activity to
downselect to one, but maybe that is not what the WG ultimately wants.

I am in favor of the WG adopting one of the following two approaches:
i) pick one now to advance as experimental WG draft
ii) allow multiple experimental WG drafts

If the WG decides to adopt multiple experimental drafts, there should be
some criteria defined for making technical progress in the evaluation,
so we do not come to the end and have the results and whole methodology
questioned once again.  I would like the people who have objected to the
past process to propose some alternatives with technical detail.  I
strongly believe it should be an agreed goal to avoid multiple draft
standards on this topic.

I am not suggesting that the WG or ADs have to accept the output of the
design team as anything but that, but I feel that the WG at some point
soon needs to make a decision to move forward somehow.

Sincerely,
Tom

---

From: Russ White <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:19:33 -0400

> construed as ad hominem and not frustration.

I'm not upset (really!), and I apologize if you think I've
misrepresented your position.

> have been waiting recently for more data or implementation code as we

The problem is, as I see it, that there simply won't be any more for the
moment. In other words--no-one, at least on the OR side, is putting any
more effort into the work, since there is no apparent commercial
interest beyond what's been implemented to do that further work.

> strongly believe it should be an agreed goal to avoid multiple draft

I believe the result may be multiple standards, since I'm not at all
certain we're all working from the same set of requirements. I think we
need a requirement document that shows exactly what the users of this
technology really expect out of it. We might find that there are several
sets of expectations, and no real way to implement them in one proposal.
For instance:

- -- Optimal efficiency.
- -- Optimal robustness with loss of efficiency acceptable.
- -- Direct interaction with existing OSPF nodes.

How important is each one? And if all of them are important to different
folks, then we probably have some contradictory requirements in here
someplace.

:-)

Russ

- --

---

From: "Henderson, Thomas R" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:49:37 -0700

> interest beyond what's been implemented to do that further work.

If your company is not putting more work into it, and there is no other
commercial interest expressed to do more work on this topic or to
implement this, then I agree that it begs the question of whether we
need to actively continue.  

Tom

---

From: Russ White <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 17:55:15 -0400

> need to actively continue.  

That's my understanding, as of a meeting about a week ago.... Which is
why, perhaps, retrenching, going experimental, and considering our
options is maybe a better option at this point (?).

:-)

Russ

- --

---

From: Richard Ogier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 22:26:08 -0700

Russ White wrote:

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If one considers OSPF to be an important routing standard, and one
considers the MANET interface to be an important interface type
in networks that use IP routing (which I believe is true), then
it makes sense to extend OSPF to support the MANET interface.
Many of us knew from the beginning that such an extension would
be useful for military applications, but it will likely be useful
for many other applications in the next 10 years.
Build it and they will come.

One example is the recent contract between Cisco, IBM, and Google for
building a wireless mesh that covers much of the SF Bay Area.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/090506-cisco-ibm-wireless.html
I'm not sure what routing protocol will be used for this, but it
indicates that a MANET extension of OSPF is likely to be useful
in the future.

>options is maybe a better option at this point (?).

With all the recent comments from Cisco, there must be *some* interest
in such an extension.  But I still think we will progress faster if
we focus on a single solution, one that belongs to the WG rather than
a proprietary solution that is under the control of one company.

If we do go with two experimental drafts, then we need to make sure
we agree on a plan to compare the solutions in a fair manner.
But we already had such a plan, and some are not cooperating with
the plan as Tom has pointed out.  I really think we should agree
on a *single* extension of OSPF for MANETs.  I think we pretty
much agree on the objectives, and different tradeoffs between
different objectives (such as robustness versus overhead) can
be achieved by selecting parameter values within a *single*
solution (e.g., using biconnected adjacencies versus uniconnected
adjacencies, or even full-topology adjacencies).

I think there will be multiple standards for MANET routing, i.e.,
OSPF-MANET and a non-OSPF MANET protocol.  But there should be
only one standard for OSPF-MANET.

Richard

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