RFC 1670 (rfc1670) - Page 2 of 3
Input to IPng Engineering Considerations
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
RFC 1670 Input to IPng Engineering Considerations August 1994
I would like to see an early decision on address structure and enough
information for service managers to start planning their transition.
Some hosts will never be upgraded and will need to be phased out or
configured with reduced connectivity. A lead time of 10 years (or
more) will help to take good long term technical decisions and ease
financial and organisational constraints.
Transition and deployment
Transition requires intimate knowledge of the environment (financial,
political as well as technical). The task needs to be broken down so
that service managers close to their clients can take decisions and
make them happen.
Let the service managers adapt the solutions for their environment by
providing them with a transition toolbox and scenarios of their uses
based on real examples. Clearly state the merits and limitations of
different transition strategies.
Provide for transition autonomy. Let systems and sites transition at
different times, as convenient for them.
Identify what software needs to be changed and keep an up-to-date
list.
Identify what is essential to have in place so that service managers
can transition at their own pace.
Allow for a feedback loop to improve software based on experience.
Configuration, Administration, Operation
We run IP on a wide range of equipment and operating systems. We
need an easy way to (re-)configure all our IP capable systems. The
systems need to be sent their IP parameters (e.g., their address,
address of their default router, address of their local name servers)
and we need to obtain data from the system (e.g., contact information
for owner, location and name of system). We also need an easy way to
update DNS.
In our environment systems are regularly moved between buildings and
we therefore find the tight coupling of IP address to physical subnet
over restrictive. Automatic configuration could help overcome this.
We would like to efficiently load balance users of various IP based
services (e.g., telnet, ftp, locally written applications) across a
number of systems.
Heagerty