Subject: [ipfix] RE: [ipfix-eval] IPDR response to evaluation drafts

From: "Ivan Batanov" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 14:37:51 -0800

Hello!

Regarding the current deployment status of IPDR I would like to add my
comments on the lack of current deployment using IPDR streaming protocol
that has been proposed to the IPFIX WG.

To the best of my knowledge there has been no interoperability testing of
this proposed streaming protocol, nor is there any "field proven"
implementation. These remarks do not imply that IPDR streaming would not
work, but the evaluators might not have understood the implications of what
Jeff Meyer's comment:

"The specific procedures introduced in Streaming IPDR are not currently
available with commercial products."
(from http://ipfix.doit.wisc.edu/eval/draft-meyer-ipfix-ipdr-eval-00.txt).

As IPDR NDM-U version 3.1 (the first version with XDR-based data
representation) was just approved in October, 2002 and there are no
production deployments of this substantially new version of the protocol.
IPDR streaming is based on this new data representation, with further
extensions (not yet approved by IPDR.org) for streaming, identified as
future version 4 of the protocol (as documented in the submission) . All
references to interoperability of IPDR are based on previous versions of the
protocol, which are usinb verbose XML instead of the proposed compact binary
representation.

There has been interoperability testing between a few of the IPDR.org
members using libraries implementing the compact reporesentation. Such
libraries are available to the IPDR members. These interoparabilities
typically employ file-based transports (FTP/shared directories) rather than
the proposed streaming IPDR protocol.

"Field proven" for IPDR should be considered to refer to older versions of a
file-based, XML-encoded version of the protocol that does not support
streaming and which is so verbose as to be unusable by IPFIX.

Furthermore, the terms "field proven" or "widely deployed" mentioned here
relate to the "D" interface (as specified in NDM-U 3.1) - the interface
between mediation systems and billing systems - not the "A" interface
(between network elements and mediation systems - which is deemed out of
scope in section 2.4.2.1 of the recently approved NDM-U 3.1). This means
that the field experience of IPDR, besides rare possible exceptions, hasn't
reached routers, switches, or other "devices", but rather was focused on
host-based IPC mechanisms.

Yours sincerely,

Ivan Batanov
Senior Network Engineer
Earthlink, Inc.
e-mail: [email-masked]

--
Help        mailto:[email-masked] and say "help" in message body
Unsubscribe mailto:[email-masked] and say
"unsubscribe ipfix" in message body
Archive     http://ipfix.doit.wisc.edu/archive/

---

From: "Aron Heintz" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 01:50:21 -0500

I'd like to point out that Ivan here violates the norms that permit healthy
dialog and collaboration in the IETF environment.  Specifically, he:

	1) Contributed misinformation instead of speaking from a position of
knowledge.  He either spent less than an hour reading NDM-U v3, or (worse)
is intentionally distorting the history of the specification.
	2) Posted criticism of one of the protocol candidates without revealing
which candidate he is advocating.  It is clear that he has a hidden agenda
of supporting one of the other candidates.  Which is it?
	3) Speaks briefly from the requirements, but fails to apply the same
measures to the other protocol candidates.  To a literal-minded thinker,
Diameter, Netflow v9, and Streaming IPDR should all be eliminated based on
"lack of current implementations", even though all are minor evolutions of
widely proven technologies.

	Jeff did a good job of correcting the misinformation in the original
message - I refer to Jeff's comments for technical clarity.

Aron Heintz
President, www.IPDR.org
+1 202-258-5544

-----Original Message-----
From: majordomo listserver [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf
Of Ivan Batanov
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 5:38
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [ipfix] RE: [ipfix-eval] IPDR response to evaluation drafts

Hello!

Yours sincerely,

Ivan Batanov
Senior Network Engineer
Earthlink, Inc.

--
Help        mailto:[email-masked] and say "help" in message
body
Unsubscribe mailto:[email-masked] and say
"unsubscribe ipfix" in message body
Archive     http://ipfix.doit.wisc.edu/archive/

---

From: "Peter Ludemann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 04:22:20 -0800

Sitting in my hotel room in Tokyo, I feel disappointed at missing IETF ...
the back-and-forth of email is almost as entertaining as the sumo matches on
TV.

Ah, for the old days of "rough consensus and running code" ... because
there's nothing like the actual experience of implementation to validate a
design. I defy anybody to implement TCP from just RFC 793 -- if you don't
believe me, ask people who lived through networks that had both the BSD and
Microsoft implementations.

Are Diameter, NetFlowV9, Streaming IPDR merely "minor evolutions of widely
proven technologies" as Aron claims, and not needing an implementation to
show how well they work? I can't speak to Diameter; but NetFlow is not easy
to collect (presumably it's easy to generate); and anybody implementing
IPDR-streaming will discover that building a system that can fail-over
nicely is just a bit trickier than it appears -- I wish I could be in
Atlanta to regale y'all over a few beers.

- peter

> Of Aron Heintz
> Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 10:50 PM
> To: Ivan Batanov; [email-masked]
> Cc: Jeff Meyer
> Subject: RE: [ipfix] RE: [ipfix-eval] IPDR response to evaluation drafts
>
>