IETF conflict review for draft-cheshire-nat-pmp
conflict-review-cheshire-nat-pmp-00

The following approval message was sent
From: The IESG
To: "Nevil Brownlee" , draft-cheshire-nat-pmp@tools.ietf.org
Cc: The IESG , , 
Subject: Results of IETF-conflict review for draft-cheshire-nat-pmp-07

The IESG has completed a review of draft-cheshire-nat-pmp-07 consistent
with RFC5742.


The IESG has no problem with the publication of 'NAT Port Mapping
Protocol (NAT-PMP)'  as an Informational
RFC.


The IESG has concluded that this work is related to IETF work done in WG
PCP, but this relationship does not prevent publishing.



The IESG would also like the RFC-Editor to review the comments in the
datatracker related to this document and determine whether or not they
merit incorporation into the document. Comments may exist in both the
ballot and the history log.

The IESG review is documented at:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/conflict-review-cheshire-nat-pmp/

A URL of the reviewed Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-cheshire-nat-pmp/

The process for such documents is described at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/indsubs.html

Thank you,

The IESG Secretary

[Ballot comment]
No objection to the conflict review.

One piece of advice to the authors.
While reading the draft, I found difficult to understand the connection between this draft and the PCP work.
The abstract mentions
    In 2012 NAT-PMP was superseded by the IETF Standards-Track
  Port Control Protocol, which builds on NAT-PMP and uses a compatible
  packet format, but adds a number of significant enhancements [PCP].

And then, it's only in the section 8 that I understood:
  In 2012 NAT-PMP was superseded by the IETF Standards-Track Port
  Control Protocol [PCP]. PCP builds on NAT-PMP and uses a compatible
  packet format, and adds a number of significant enhancements,
  including IPv6 support, management of outbound mappings, management
  of firewall rules, full compatibility with large-scale NATs with a
  pool of external addresses, error lifetimes, and an extension
  mechanism to enable future enhancements.

The intro should contain this text, with some information about the timing of draft-cheshire-nat-pmp-06 and draft-ietf-pcp-base-26. What confused me was that those two documents are being worked in parallel. So competing solutions? not really!. It's just that draft-cheshire-nat-pmp-06 should have ideally be published years ago, so that PCP could build on top of it. Note: I had to call Ralph Droms to get this history.

[Ballot comment]

- The authors note that PCP is the IETF standards-track way to do
this stuff. But I wasn't clear if they're saying that it'd be good
for clients of this protocol to upgrade to PCP or that clients of
NAT-PMP are just fine to keep using it as they do today and
needn't bother updating to PCP even if a NAT box has. (I'm not
saying that one is better than the other, nor that the authors are
wrong to not say, but I was left wondering.)

- This refers to rfc 1918. I'm not sure when it'd be good to start
referring instead to the new IANA registries, or if that'd be
better here or not, but you might want to think about it.

- I wondered (but didn't check) if there's any way to confuse the
messages here with PCP messages since the same ports are to be
used for both. If so, might be no harm to note that or to explain
how to disambiguate the two protocols. (If its entirely obvious
when you read both then I guess its fine not to say.)

The draft draft-cheshire-nat-pmp-06
is ready for publication from the Independent Stream.
Please ask IESG to review it, as set out in RFC 5742.

The following is some background for this draft, please forward it
to IESG along with this request ...

Stuart Cheshire submitted this draft in September 2012, he pointed
out that this draft provides historical background for a cluster
of pending RFCs in the PCP WG.

Dave Thaler (PCP co-chair) has reviewed the draft, Stuart has
updated it to address the few issues he raised.