Joel M. Halpern | 16 Jun 2012 20:59

Review of draft-ietf-mpls-gach-adv-02

(Sorry this is a day light.  Messy travel schedule.)
This document is clear, concise, and useful.
However, I do have some comments and questions.

The TLV structure is carefully laid out so that the Length is on a 16 
bit boundary, and the whole thing can be processed on 32 bit boundaries. 
  However, there is no requirement for padding or alignment on TLVs.  As 
such, implementations must allow for someone defining a TLV that takes 
an odd number of bytes, thus apparently removing all the advantage of 
the alignment care.

What is the point of the Message Identifier?  It is set by the sender as 
they please.  It is never sent back to the sender.  So the receiver can 
not do anything with it, since they have no idea how it was set.  And 
the sender can not do anything with it, since they sender never sees it 
again.  This field either needs more explaantion, or needs to be removed.

Section 4 on the G-ACh Advertisement Protocol TLVs starts by saying that 
the TLVS for the GAP protocol itself "represent metadata and processing 
instructions rather than static data that is meant to be retained."  But 
information like Source Address distinctly appears to be static data 
meant to be retained.  yes, it should be included in each GAP message. 
But it seems likely that the primary use of having the information would 
be based on retention / reuse.

In section 3, 4th paragraph, the text says
    The payload of a GAP message is an Application Data Block (ADB)
    consisting of one or more block elements.
But, the payload consists of a fixed header followed by the ADB.  Since 
this fixed header is not inherited from some other document, and is 
(Continue reading)

Stewart Bryant | 22 Oct 2012 16:42
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Re: Review of draft-ietf-mpls-gach-adv-02

On 16/06/2012 19:59, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> (Sorry this is a day light.  Messy travel schedule.)
> This document is clear, concise, and useful.
> However, I do have some comments and questions.
>
>
> The TLV structure is carefully laid out so that the Length is on a 16 
> bit boundary, and the whole thing can be processed on 32 bit 
> boundaries.  However, there is no requirement for padding or alignment 
> on TLVs.  As such, implementations must allow for someone defining a 
> TLV that takes an odd number of bytes, thus apparently removing all 
> the advantage of the alignment care.
>
This is a good point. The IETF tends to align align fields and forgets 
that the most common
datalink header is 14bytes.

The existing TLVs do not need padding. Reserved fields have proved useful in
protocols in the past, and thus it seems unwise to remove them. I propose
leaving the text as is, but if other feel strongly that we need to make 
a change
here we will do so during the next review period.

> What is the point of the Message Identifier?  It is set by the sender 
> as they please.  It is never sent back to the sender.  So the receiver 
> can not do anything with it, since they have no idea how it was set.  
> And the sender can not do anything with it, since they sender never 
> sees it again.  This field either needs more explaantion, or needs to 
> be removed.
Later in the section it says:
(Continue reading)


Gmane