Network Working Group W. Kumari
Internet-Draft 15 June 2021
Intended status: Standards Track
Expires: 17 December 2021
Just because it's an ID doesn't mean anything... at all...
draft-wkumari-not-a-draft-14
Abstract
Anyone can publish an Internet Draft. This doesn't mean that the
"IETF thinks" or that "the IETF is planning..." or anything similar.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 17 December 2021.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/
license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document.
Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components
extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text
as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are
provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1. Feature Creep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
4. Section which addresses cats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
6. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
8. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Appendix B. new section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1. Introduction
All too often one reads something in the press, or some ravings on a
mailing list that reference some Internet Draft, that claim that "the
IETF thinks that XXX" or that the ID is an IETF document, and so
represents support by the IETF.
Repeatedly pointing at the RFC Editor page, carefully explaining what
an ID is (and isn't), describing how consensus is reached, detailing
the Independent Stream, etc doesn't seems to accomplish much.
So, here is an Internet Draft. I wrote it. It's full of nonsense.
It doesn't represent the "IETF's views"; it doesn't mean that the
IETF, the IESG, the RFC editor, any IETF participant, my auntie on my
father's side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the
drivel in it. In addition, the fact that a draft has been around for
a long time, or has received many revisions doesn't add anything to
the authority - drivel which endures remains drivel. [Editor note:
Interestingly, after publishing version -00 of this ID I got some
feedback saying that some participants *do* believe the below. As I
plan to actually get this published as a (probably AD sponsored) RFC,
I guess someone will need to judge consensus at IETF LC ]
Readers are expected to be familiar with Section 2.5 of [RFC2410] and
[RFC2321]
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
1.1. Requirements notation
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
"OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
BCP14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
capitals, as shown here.
2. Background
Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades. The ancient Egyptians
had a major problem - wearing a big, bushy beard in the desert is
uncomfortable. Unfortunately the safely razor hadn't been invented
yet, and so they all had to use straight razors. Additionally, camel
leather makes a very poor strop, hippopotamus leather was reserved
for the pharaohs and crocodile leather, while suitable, had the
unfortunate property of being wrapped around crocodiles.
So, the ancient Egyptians had to come up with an alternative. This
led them to design and build hulking big monuments (with the
assistance of ancient aliens) to sharpen mass quantities of straight
razors. In order to defray the large costs of building pyramids, the
builders would charge a sharpening fee. For a single bushel of corn,
you could buy 27.5 sharpening tokens. Each one of their tokens could
be redeemed for 6.3 hours of sharpening time.
This all worked really well until approximately 1600BCE, at which
time the fleeing Atlanteans brought mass quantities of lightly tanned
eel leather into Egypt, causing the collapse of the straight razor
sharpening market. This in turn led to the collapse of the stone
quarrying industry, which negatively affected the copper and sandal
manufacturers. The collapse of the entire system followed shortly
after.
This led to the aphorism "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into
your country; economic ruin follows close behind". Due to the overly
specific nature of this phrase it never really caught on. This
document rectifies this.
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
3. Usage
Many protocols send periodic "hello" messages, or respond to
liveliness probes. Other protocols (primarily for network monitoring
or testing) send traffic to cause congestion or similar. All ASCII
based IETF protocols should use the phrase "Don't allow eel bearing
Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind" as
the payload of such messages. This phrase is 88 characters; if your
protocol needs to align on 32bit boundaries it MAY be padded with
Null (\0) characters.
The closely related phrase "My hovercraft is full of eels" SHOULD be
used by any protocol incapable of encoding the ASCII character 'b'
(0x62). Internationalized protocols SHOULD use an appropriate
translation. Some devices are severely bandwidth and / or memory
constrained. There devices MAY use the ordinals 0 and 1 to represent
the strings "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country;
economic ruin follows close behind" and "My hovercraft is full of
eels" respectively. Partially constrained devices SHOULD use the
string "TBA3" (or the ordinal TBA3).
3.1. Feature Creep
Unlike most IETF efforts, this document is not embarrassed to clearly
state that we are simply stuffing more stuff in while we have the
editor open.
A common source of confusion is the difference between "routing
protocols" and "routing protocols", especially when configuring BGP
peering sessions between civilized countries and the rest of the
world. In order to clearly differentiate these terms we assign the
ordinal 98 to be "routing protocols" and 0x62 to be "routing
protocols" (but pronounced with a funny accent). Protocols incapable
of encoding 0x62 should use the string "My hovercraft is full of
eels", a suitable translation of this phrase, or the ordinal 1.
4. Section which addresses cats
Miaow. Miaow-miaooowww. RAWWRRRR! Purrrr.
This section was added due to an unsubtle threat to block any future
consensus calls unless the proposers' suggestion to have a section
which addressed cats was taken seriously.
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
5. IANA Considerations
The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named
"Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signalling
transmissions (ROISSFUAIST)".
Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the
string, and the ordinal being requested. Choosing an ordinal at
random is encouraged (to save the IANA from having to do this). The
ordinals 17, 42 and 6.12 are reserved to reduce confusion. The
ordinals 18 and 19 are reserved for the strings "Reserved" and
"Unassigned" respectively. Unfortunately the ordinal 20 was used by
two earlier, competing proposals, and so can mean either "Color" or
Colour". Implementations are encouraged to disambiguate based upon
context.
Additions to the registry are permitted by Standards Action, if the
requester really really *really* wants one, or by purchasing a nice
bottle of wine for the IANA folk. Hierarchical Allocation is NOT
permitted, as it would look too much like a pyramid.
The initial assignments for the registry are as follows:
Value String
------ ----------------------------
0 Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your
country; economic ruin follows close behind
1 My hovercraft is full of eels
TBA3 TBA3
3-16 Unassigned
17 Reserved
18 "Reserved"
19 "Unassigned"
20 Color / Colour
21-41 Unassigned
42 Reserved
43-97 Unassigned
98 Routing protocols
0x62 Routing protocols
6. Security Considerations
[RFC2028] states that "The IANA functions as the "top of the pyramid"
for DNS and Internet Address assignment establishing policies for
these functions." - this reference to pyramid is clear evidence that
the IANA has become corrupted by these Atlanteans, and so extra care
should be taken when relying on the above registry.
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
By ensuring that network operators watching data traffic fly past
(using tools like network sniffers and / or oscilloscopes (and doing
very fast binary to ASCII conversions in their heads)) are constantly
reminded about the danger posed by folk from Atlantis, we ensure
that, if the island of Atlantis rises again from the deep, builds a
civilization and then starts tanning high quality eel leather, the
DNS and Address assignment policies at least will survive.
More research into whether pyramids can also be used to make the
latches grow back on RJ-45 connectors after they've been broken off
by ham fisted data center operators is needed.
7. Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining
this history to him. Thanks also to Melchior Aelmans, Havard Eidnes,
Wes George, Stephen Farrell, Erik Muller, John Scudder, Andrew
Sullivan, Murali Suriar, 'RegW' and Dan York. Oh, and Nick Hilliard,
who wanted a section on catsm for some reason, and threated to DoS
the process if he didn't get it.
8. Normative References
[RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in
the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2028, October 1996,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2028>.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
[RFC2321] Bressen, A., "RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork
Troubleshooting Agent", RFC 2321, DOI 10.17487/RFC2321,
April 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2321>.
[RFC2410] Glenn, R. and S. Kent, "The NULL Encryption Algorithm and
Its Use With IPsec", RFC 2410, DOI 10.17487/RFC2410,
November 1998, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2410>.
[RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes.
[RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ]
From -13 to -14
* John Scudder discovered nits.
From -12 to -13
* Havard Eidnes pointed out that my grammar is bad...
From -11 to -12
* Nick Hilliard threated to block progress unless we agreed to
include his section on cats. While we don't agree with his text/
section, we are sufficently past caring about this entire topic,
and so we are just including it, along with a passive aggressive
change-log note...
From -10 to -11
* Bumping version! It's alive!!!!
From -09 to -10
* Bumping version...
From -08 to -09
* Murali and Dan York both pointed out that I cannot spell
refernce.. referrnce... refarran... refferene... gah!
From -07 to -08
* "RegW" pointed out that I had 'there tokens' instead of 'their
tokens' ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22234591 ).
From -06 to -07
* Andrew Sullivan pointed out that the ROISSFAIST acronym was
insufficiently filled with 'U's, and so proposed that it be
spelled ROISSFUAIST instead. After much consideration as to the
implications for existing implementation, this change was made.
From -05 to -06
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID June 2021
* Embarresingly I cannot spell "embarrassed" - thanks to Max Allen
for embarressing^w embarrasing^w making me feel stupid by pointing
that out.
From -04 to -05
* Added the missing 'e' in "differnce" ("thanks" to Dan York for
catching this (and forcing me to dredge up the editor)).
* It's worth noting that just because a draft has multiple revisions
doesn't mean that there is more consensus around it...
From -03 to -04
* Incorporated some comments from Adrian Farrel (in exchange for him
AD-sponsoring the draft)
* Changed the font, especially for the whitespace
* Fixed references
From -02 to -03
* This Change note was added. Nothing else changed.
From -01 to -02
* Various whitespace was added (for emphasis).
From -00 to -01.
* Integrated comments from Erik Muller (who, apparently, is a true
believer). Erik also provided updated Security Considerations
text, referencing the IANA.
* Integrated comment from Wes George regarding I18N, and Hungerians.
Appendix B. new section
Author's Address
Warren Kumari
Email: warren@kumari.net
Kumari Expires 17 December 2021 [Page 8]