Network Working Group W. Kumari
Internet-Draft
Intended status: Standards Track April 14, 2014
Expires: October 16, 2014
Just because it's an ID doesn't mean anything.
draft-wkumari-not-a-draft-02
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
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This Internet-Draft will expire on October 16, 2014.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1. Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
3. Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
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
fathers side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the
drivel in it. [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 ]
1.1. Requirements notation
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
2. Background
Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades. The ancient Egyptians
has 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. Unfortunately camel
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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 there 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 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 cliche "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.
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).
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4. IANA Considerations
The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named
"Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signalling
transmissions (ROISSFAIST)".
Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the
string, and the ordinal being requested. Choosing an ordinal at
random is encouraged (to safe 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" respectivly. Unfortunatly 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 wants one, or by purchasing a nice bottle of
wine for the IANA folk. Hierarchical Allocation is NOT permitted, as
it looks 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
5. 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." 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
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quality eel leather, the DNS and Address assignment policies at least
will survive.
More research into if pyramids can also be used for sharpening RJ-45
connectors is needed.
6. Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining
this history to him. Thanks also to Erik Muller, Wes George, Stephen
Farrell.
7. References
7.1. Normative References
[RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in
the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October
1996.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
7.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-sidr-iana-objects]
Manderson, T., Vegoda, L., and S. Kent, "RPKI Objects
issued by IANA", draft-ietf-sidr-iana-objects-03 (work in
progress), May 2011.
Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes.
[RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ]
From -01 to -02
o Various whitespace was added (for emphasis).
From -00 to -01.
o Integrated comments from Erik Muller (who, apparently, is a true
believer). Erik also provided updated Security Considerations
text, referncing the IANA.
o Integrated comment from Wes George regarding I18N, and Hungerians.
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Author's Address
Warren Kumari
Email: warren@kumari.net
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