Minutes for BABEL at IETF-96
minutes-96-babel-3

BABEL WG Minutes
	IETF 96 — Intercontinental Hotel, Berlin, Germany
	Thursday, July 21, 2016, 16:20 - 18:20 Potsdam II Room

Notes taken by Margaret Cullen (Painless Security), edited by the
Donald Eastlake

Administrivia, Agenda Bashing
=============================
Chairs: Russ White (LinkedIn), Donald Eastlake (Huawei)
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-babel-0.pdf

Margaret Cullen agreed to take minutes.
Barbara Stark agreed to be jabber scribe.
No one suggested any changes in the agenda.

Status, Review of Milestones
============================

There has been a call for WG adoption on the mailing list with several
supporting messages and no opposition. No one in the room was opposed
to adopting the RFC6126bis document as a WG item. Chairs directed the
authors to republish as a WG draft.

Juliusz: Thinks that first draft on “Related Drafts” list
(diversity-routing) is out-of-scope for WG.  Donald Eastlake
agreed. It's the source-specific routing that is in scope.

First Milestone item is completed (adopt base draft as WG document).

Proposed Changes to BABEL Routing Specification
===============================================
Juliusz Chroboczek
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-babel-2.pdf

First slides discuss establishing traditions for group.  Main points:
work happens on mailing list, not face-to-face; if it isn’t
implemented, it doesn't get in; BABEL user requirement focus.  BABEL
is not a clone of another routing protocol.

RFC 6126 and 7557 should be one document.  They were separate
documents for historical reasons, but should be merged in the
standards track version.

BABEL version has been stable at version “2” for 4 or 5 years.

Discussion of Security Slide:

Margaret Cullen (Painless Security): Need to know what threats we are
trying to defend against before we choose a mechanism.

Juliusz: Need to know threats, look at mechanisms to handle those
threats, and decide how complex you want the code to be.

Justin Dean: MANET group has a TLV for security.  Thinks we should
change the BABEL packet format to allow use of the Manet TLVs.

Juliusz: Willing to talk, but skeptical [details of response lost,
sorry].

Don Eastlake: We will have difficulty with security area in getting
mechanisms through if they only provide for static keying.

Juliusz: Document under discussion has already been adopted as a WG
document.  Need to fix errata and integrate RFC 7557 — lots of
meticulous editing, to make sure it reads as one document.
 
Dave Taht: Does not think the term “primary metric” should be used for
the loop avoidance metric. Since we support "secondary metrics" the
most important of those should be called the primary metric and the
metric currently called "primary" should be called "loop avoidance"
Also, is there a use cases document?  Do we need one?

Alia Atlas (Juniper): No.  There is an applicability document, which
has some similarity to use case but not the same as a use cases
document.

Juliusz: Is use cases document needed in addition to applicability?

Alia: No.  We are here for things we can implement and play with.  The
WG was intentionally chartered with a minimal number of documents that
do not lead to code.

Russ White: Use cases can be useful, but don’t have to be drafts.  We
could put them on a wiki if that is useful.

Justin Dean: Question on presentation: Should you worry about
duplicate IDs?  Justin would strongly suggest against detecting
duplicate IDs in the WG.

John Daddle (?):  The use case thing did go  through head when talking
about  security.  Thinks  you  need  to know  use  cases  to work  out
security threats.  Would strongly advocate for short set of use cases,
to give the security ADs something to work with.

Toke J: (Something missed).  Doesn’t like the idea of using the MANET
packet format, at all.  Would not want to implement it.

Alvaro Retana (Cisco): Slides talked about implementation and
deployment experience before including a feature.  Is that WG
consensus?

Don Eastlake: No.  Not set by WG as an immutable rule.  Just attempt
to set culture.

Juliusz: I used the word “tradition”.  Would like to see the tradition
live on in this working group.

Benedict R: Regarding Justin’s comment on routing IDs — sometimes
running on a embedded system without real-time clock.  When you reboot
multiple nodes (power outage), you can easily get a situation where
you all get the same number.

Denis O: Would like to note that running code tradition is not only a
proposal for the WG, but has been the way things are done in the BABEL
group.  Would like to see it used here.  Also, comments about
security: would be great to receive comments on his recent post to the
mailing list.  Would like to get review/feedback.

BABEL Information Model
=======================
Barbara Stark, draft-stark-babel-information-model
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-babel-1.pdf

Has been discussion of need for information model or Yang data model,
so she thought she would throw something out there.  Went through RFC
to find everything that there is any way it could be included in an
information model.  Only base draft. Probably some of it should be
thrown out.

Did not attempt to separate state vs. configuration.  Very little
needed for configuration, and thinks minimal configuration should be
support (none of which must be supported).

Homenet for Hacker Boards
=========================
David Taht
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/96/slides/slides-96-babel-3.pdf

Dave:  Can anyone run homenet on iOS?

Tommy: Clarified he meant iOS (for iPhone), not IOS (for Cisco
routers).  Has run homenet and BABEL on an iPhone, but requires
special in-house version.

Denis: In older days, PPP was used for addressing, etc. on
point-to-point connection.  Could be considered?

Dave T: Not going to see (very fast network technologies) on your home
network any time soon.

Juliusz: Says that we will never subnet beyond /64.  Instead, we
assign a /128 and do pure host routing.

Lorenzo: Why not do a subnet length of /127, since that is a valid
subnet length, and /126 is not?

Alex Petrescu: Very happy to see IPv6 over USB discussion.  (Lost part
of discussion)

Dave: Brought up questions from end of presentation.  Is making BABEL
work well on alternate link layers a goal of this WG?  If so, which
ones (USB, PowerLine, Thunderbolt, etc…)

Barbara:  Do you mean Non-Ethernet?

Dave:  Yes.

??: We already have IP over avian carriers :-)

Barbara: Bluetooth and 6Lo don’t use Ethernet Mac, but some power line
specs do?  (Not X.10)

Dave: We don’t measure quality of those layers at a level we need.

Barbara: When we run them to a router, they look just like Ethernet.
Extreme concern is that hopefully BABEL can tell they are not Ethernet
(more delay, more loss), etc.  Hopefully BABEL will not assume that
anything with an Ethernet MAC is Ethernet.

Alia: How do IP over different link layers is an Internet area.
Important to decouple that from routing protocols, like BABEL.  Keep
problem decomposed and focus on what we need to do here.  We did set
complex metrics out-of-scope for the initial charter.  Good
discussions can be useful, but we have some basic work to get done
first.  If there are specific link layers that it is important for the
Internet area to work on, they should go to the Internet Area.

Juliusz: BABEL needs to distinguish two things: (1) link properties,
loss, delay, etc.  and (2) what MAC is in use.  Need to distinguish
between this WG (the standard BABEL protocol) and various BABEL
implementations (BABELd, etc.).  The implementations might do things
(like detecting wireless links) that aren’t part of the BABEL Routing
Protocol.  Interesting work in the MANET space about metrics for
different network types.  Many people here have been doing interesting
work on this problem, but we are not going to solve it here in the
BABEL WG.  Would like to see main document that says “we can work with
any metric that has the following properties”, and informative or
experimental work defining specific metrics (some of last part lost).

Alia: One of the things that may be useful is to articulate what parts
of the system are supposed to do what parts of the functionality?  For
example, one thing IP does is verify you can sent packets to a certain
MTU.  Discuss what sort of functionality does an IGP have?  And are
there other pieces that are needed?

Dave: You can go and deploy BABEL on a bunch of boxes that cost less
than $8 a piece today.  Highly encourages people to go, experiment and
find their own edge cases.

Wrap-Up
=======
Thanks to everyone for coming and participating. See you at the next
meeting and on the mailing list.