[routing-wg]Four byte ASN notation

The revised version history has been a process of a) revising the 
document in the light of comments received or b) resubmitting the 
document to circumvent the draft dieing

http://smakd.potaroo.net/ietf/idref/draft-michaelson-4byte-as-representation/index.html
has the full history.

The most substantive discussion has been int he RIPE Routing WG, and 
there was earlier discussion at the ARIN meeting itself.

The emerging convention appears to be "asdot" as far as I can tell, 
although there are some folk who insist that the added complexity in 
using regular expressions involving AS numebrs should rule this out. 
Others see this notation as being no more or less of a problem that IP 
address dotted quad and cite the number space of two smaller numbers as 
being less prone to human transcription and use errors.

Its a style thing

Geoff

tp wrote:
> Geoff
> 
> Interesting.
> 
> I was unsure whether or not this WG was familiar with the Internet Draft I
> referred to and thought that in case it was not, I would mention it.
> 
> Before doing so, I checked the status on the Internet Drafts and was puzzled by
> what I saw - but posted here anyway.
> 
> The discussion on the IETF idr list a year ago was in response to a Last Call of
> an individual submission (as opposed to a chartered item of a Working
> Group)after which, I would expect it either to be approved as an RFC, or revised
> and resubmitted.  A year later it is not an RFC - hence my reference to meeting
> resistance - nor have I seen any further discussion about it on the idr list.
> 
> So when I checked the Internet Drafts database, I wouldn't have been surprised
> to see that the ID had expired.  Instead, it has advanced from version -01 to
> version -05; five versions in a year is the progress of a swift, rather than
> that of a snail,  hence my reference to 'winging it'.  And you have joined in as
> an editor of it.
> 
> So I remain puzzled; is it being discussed somewhere else? (NANOG?:-) what has
> triggered all revised versions?  where has it been in the past year and where is
> it going?
> 
> Tom Petch
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Geoff Huston" <gih at apnic.net>
> To: "tp" <ripe at dial.pipex.com>
> Cc: "Rob Evans" <rhe at nosc.ja.net>; <routing-wg at ripe.net>
> Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 3:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [routing-wg]Four byte ASN notation
> 
> 
>> Tom Petch wrote:
>>> Not sure if you aware but there is an IETF Internet Draft winging its way
>>> through the system on this topic, namely
>>>
>>>
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-michaelson-4byte-as-representation-05.
>>> txt
>>>
>>
>> speaking as a co-author here: "winging its way" is not a phrase I'd use
>> for almost any draft in the IETF system, but in this case its an
>> entirely inappropriate characterization of the pace of this document.
>>
>> The tracked state of this draft is "AD is Watching", but if you look a
>> little closer you see that the IETF Area Director listed is not a
>> current Routing Area director.
>>
>> So this characterization is just a little exaggerated!
>>
>> Like the 4byte AS draft itself I'd tend towards an adjective to describe
>> thepace of this document through the IETF as "glacial" but maybe others
>> would see "geological" as being closer to reality ;-).
>>
>> Even so, I encourage those who have some interest in this topic to read
>> the draft and comment, either to the authors, to this mailing list, to
>> the idr mailing list where the 4 byte ASN work was undertaken in the
>> context of the IETF, or wherever else that might take your fancy.
>>
>>
>>> It did get discussed on the IETF idr list in October 2006, and met
> significant
>>> resistance.
>> Again I have to say that this characterization is just a little exaggerated!
>>
>>
>>>  There were also comments then about NANOG taking a position on
>>> this.
>>
>> err? NANOG "taking a position" ? How? Though some subliminal collective
>> subconscious alignment? Or via some alignment of the planets?
>>
>>
>>>  I haven't seen any discussion since.
>>
>> Notation is such a strange thing - all kinds of folk have flash opinions
>> about notation but in the end notation is like pronounciation - informal
>>   use accretes social weight through continued usage and then the
>> informaal use becomes a convention which then becomes usage rules. But
>> when we try to apply this social process to technology we run into the
>> issue of formal notation and rigid grammars because of the issues of
>> have a notation that can be used conveniently by both human and machine
>> parsers. So it makes some sense to try to define a notation convention
>> early on in the process.
>>
>> The draft notes some alternatives for notation that have been observed
>> so far and makes a recommendation to adopt one such notation ("asdot" in
>> this case, using the terminology as described in the draft)
>>
>>> Current status is Application Director Watching
>> Actual status is "previous AD might have been watching"
>>
>> Rob Evan's advice to the folk on this list that:
>>
>> "people do need to review their in-house tools and scripts to ensure
>> they will work with numbers expressed in this notation."
>>
>> is still appropriate and extends far beyond mere notation. The issue is
>> one of looking at your operating support system and provisioning tools
>> and even if you are not going to upgrade your routers' BGP anytime soon,
>> what happens when your customers or peers front up with a 4 byte ASN and
>> your systems start to see AS23456 popping up everywhere?
>>
>> (see slides 38 and 39 of http://www.iepg.org/2007-12-ietf70/asns.pdf for
>> some additional pointers here as to what to review and why)
>>
>>
>>
>> regards,
>>
>>    Geoff
>>
>>
>