Subject: [apps-discuss] Request for Review - draft-yevstifeyev-rlogin-uri-00

From: Mykyta Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 12:32:00 +0200

Hello all,

In accordance with RFC 4395 I'm asking to review the 
draft-yevstifeyev-rlogin-uri-00, that can be found here: 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yevstifeyev-rlogin-uri-00

This document specifies the 'rlogin' URI scheme.  The Rlogin protocol is 
defined in RFC 1282.

Thank you for your time,
Mykyta Yevstifeyev

P.S. I've also posted such message on uri-review list.  Mykyta

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 06:39:34 -0800

> P.S. I've also posted such message on uri-review list.  Mykyta

This seems like another waste of time.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 09:41:37 -0500

> This seems like another waste of time.

+1

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From: Mykyta Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:53:01 +0200

> This seems like another waste of time.
I do not know why do you think so - Rlogin is quite widely-used 
alternative for Telnet on Unix systems.
> _______________________________________________
> apps-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/apps-discuss
>

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From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 07:05:14 -0800

> alternative for Telnet on Unix systems.

Mykyta: do you read the responses to your earlier drafts? If you do, you 
would in fact know why I think so. It is the same reason as I and others 
have said the same thing about most/all your other proposals. If you 
don't read the responses, then I would very much encourage you to stop 
posting to any IETF WG lists: they are supposed to be discussions, not 
one-way announcements.

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 10:54:26 -0500

Mykyta,

Please consider this a micro-review as well as a request.

Speaking for myself and not in any "official" capacity I might
have, I really appreciate the amount of energy and effort you
are putting into updating and classifying documents and tying up
assorted loose ends.  Unfortunately, many of us have other
commitments both inside and outside the IETF, to the point that
your having many individual submission (non-WG) documents
outstanding at once almost guarantees that few of them will get
adequate review.  Reflecting on some of the other comments you
have received, I suggest that the dividing line between "useful
update or supplement to existing protocol or document" and
"waste of time" is very narrow indeed.   While a specification
or three that lay close to that boundary might be accepted by
the community (especially if well-motivated as to why the work
is needed), a large collection of such proposals, without good
motivation, are likely to result in increases in the number of
people who assume everything you are submitting falls into the
"wasting your time and that of everyone else" category.

May I suggest that you try to prioritize review requests
somewhat so as to avoid having the decisions as to what gets
reviewed made at random or of having people conclude that you
simply have too much time on your hands and assume others do too.

In the case of this particular spec, my decision to look at it
was more driven by curiosity about what you had covered and the
particular time at which I saw you note than by any rational
decision on my part.  I consider that a symptom of the problem.
However, now that I have glanced at it:

(1) Despite the assertions in the draft, rlogin was never
defined by the IETF.  Both RFCs 1258 and 1282 are informational
documents that described the state of the protocol (as of twenty
years ago) for the information of the IETF community.  Neither
reflects the state of the protocol or user-level commands as
they are implemented and defined today.  You might examine 
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rlogin&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html
as an example of documentation that is closer to the
contemporary practice (but it only describes one implementation
for one operating system).

(2) It is probably a bad idea to create URIs that make it easy
to use badly-designed, security-problematic, protocols... and to
use them in those problematic ways.    If there were a
compelling need to do so, that might be different but, IMO, it
would also carry with it the need to either 

	-- have an up-to-date IETF spec with a decent security
	analysis or
	
	-- reference documentation for at least most the popular
	implementations in the URI spec and include a security
	analysis there.

(3) If we really want to do a URI for rlogin (you can deduce
from the rest of this message that I have my doubts), we should
do something complete and comprehensive, addressing both the
many options in contemporary versions of the protocol and the
other transports over which similar facilities are used.

(4) There is a very general design question about the
desirability of defining URIs to open terminal sessions or the
equivalent.  I seem to be in the IETF minority in being
concerned about that (e.g., we have a Telnet URI registered and
the ftp one can be used to open an interactive session), but I
think it would be lots more useful to get a URI defined for rsh
(or to combine the two) or sftp than to have one for rlogin.
Whether even though would fall above the threshold for not being
a waste of time is a separate question; again, I have my doubts.

regards,
   john

--On Thursday, February 03, 2011 12:32 +0200 Mykyta Yevstifeyev
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> This document specifies the 'rlogin' URI scheme.  The Rlogin
> protocol is defined in RFC 1282.
> 
> Thank you for your time,
> Mykyta Yevstifeyev
>

---

From: Mykyta Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:20:21 +0200

03.02.2011 17:05, Paul Hoffman wrote:
> Mykyta: do you read the responses to your earlier drafts? If you do, 
> you would in fact know why I think so. It is the same reason as I and 
> others have said the same thing about most/all your other proposals. 
> If you don't read the responses, then I would very much encourage you 
> to stop posting to any IETF WG lists: they are supposed to be 
> discussions, not one-way announcements.
If something appears for one proposal, it is not sure this will be said 
about the other one.  My right - to propose; yours - to accept or decline.

Mykyta

---

From: Paul Hoffman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 08:35:03 -0800

> about the other one. My right - to propose; yours - to accept or decline.

Of course. But you said that you did not know why I thought this was a 
waste of time. If you had read earlier responses from me and many other 
members of the IETF community, you would have known that.

---

From: "t.petch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 17:28:31 +0100

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Moore" <[email-masked]>
To: "Paul Hoffman" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 3:41 PM
> > This seems like another waste of time.

+ another one

Tom Petch

---

From: "t.petch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2011 17:45:13 +0100

John

A propos sftp, there was a joint ssh/sftp I-D in the secssh WG but it fell
by the wayside for lack of support in the WG.  The ssh part made it to IETF
Last Call last November and, 50 days later, the status is revised I-D needed.

Tom Petch

----- Original Message -----
From: "John C Klensin" <[email-masked]>
To: "Mykyta Yevstifeyev" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 4:54 PM
Subject: Re: [apps-discuss] Request for Review - draft-yevstifeyev-rlogin-uri-00

> they are implemented and defined today.  You might examine
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=rlogin&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=Free
BSD+8.1-RELEASE&format=html

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:39:56 -0500

--On Thursday, February 03, 2011 17:45 +0100 "t.petch"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> John
> 
> A propos sftp, there was a joint ssh/sftp I-D in the secssh WG
> but it fell by the wayside for lack of support in the WG.  The
> ssh part made it to IETF Last Call last November and, 50 days
> later, the status is revised I-D needed.

And so?

If I ran the IETF, a lot of priorities would probably be
different.  I don't, and that is probably a good thing for all
of us, myself included.   

I was only trying to make one point, which is that I think we
should be a lot more concerned about URIs for older protocols
that retrieve or deliver things than about URIs that merely
start interactive sessions.   Simply having a URI for the FooBar
protocol is unlikely to cause even one more user-level system to
implement the underlying protocol.  Worse, it might even cause
what I think is the worst case -- a half-baked, insecure, and
sloppy implementation to conform to a checklist.

So, for old protocols, I think we should be asking the questions:

	(1) Does anyone care about the underlying protocol any
	more?
	
	(2) Do we want to encourage the implementation and use
	of that protocol on the public Internet and is the URI
	definition satisfactory for that purpose?
	
	(3) Would the URI actually enable some useful
	functionality rather than just providing an alternate
	syntax for starting some command or subsystem?

For sftp and its close relatives, I think the answer to all
three questions is "yes", even if the secssh WG either doesn't
agree or doesn't see there as being work on it that the IETF
needs to do.

For rlogin, I'd give a weak "yes" to the first question
--certainly the thing is in active use on a lot of LANs-- but
I'd give a negative answer to the other two.

But those are just my opinion.

    john

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:19:55 -0500

--On Thursday, February 03, 2011 6:20 PM +0200 Mykyta
Yevstifeyev <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> Mykyta: do you read the responses to your earlier drafts? If
>> you do,  you would in fact know why I think so. It is the
>> same reason as I and  others have said the same thing about
>> most/all your other proposals.  If you don't read the
>> responses, then I would very much encourage you  to stop
>> posting to any IETF WG lists: they are supposed to be 

> If something appears for one proposal, it is not sure this
> will be said about the other one.  My right - to propose;
> yours - to accept or decline.

Actually, it is also Paul's "right" -- and that of others in the
community -- to simply ignore your review requests and/or to try
to persuade the IESG to not issue Last Calls on your proposals.
Should things get to that point -- and I certainly hope they
will not because I believe that some of your ideas and proposals
are potentially useful-- then you would still have the "right"
to propose, but the proposals would never go anywhere.  That
situation would do neither you nor the community any good.

best,
   john