Network Working Group W. Kumari Internet-Draft Intended status: Standards Track April 14, 2014 Expires: October 16, 2014 Just because it's an ID doesn't mean anything. draft-wkumari-not-a-draft-01 Abstract Anyone can publish an Internet Draft. This doesn't mean that the "IETF thinks" or that "the IETF is planning..." or anything similar. Status of This Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on October 16, 2014. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2014 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. Kumari Expires October 16, 2014 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID April 2014 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.1. Requirements notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2. Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 3. Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 5. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 6. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 7.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1. Introduction All too often one reads something in the press, or some ravings on a mailing list that reference some Internet Draft, that claim that "the IETF thinks that XXX" or that the ID is an IETF document, and so represents support by the IETF. Repeatedly pointing at the RFC Editor page, carefully explaining what an ID is (and isn't), describing how consensus is reached, detailing the Independent Stream, etc doesn't seems to accomplish much. So, here is an Internet Draft. I wrote it. It's full of nonsense. It doesn't represent the "IETF's views"; it doesn't mean that the IETF, the IESG, the RFC editor, any IETF participant, my auntie on my fathers side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the drivel in it. [Editor note: Interestingly, after publishing version -00 of this ID I got some feedback saying that some participants *do* believe the below. As I plan to actually get this published as a (probably AD sponsored) RFC, I guess someone will need to judge consensus at IETF LC ] 1.1. Requirements notation The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119]. 2. Background Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades. The ancient Egyptians has a major problem - wearing a big, bushy beard in the desert is uncomfortable. Unfortunately the safely razor hadn't been invented yet, and so they all had to use straight razors. Unfortunately camel Kumari Expires October 16, 2014 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID April 2014 leather makes a very poor strop, hippopotamus leather was reserved for the pharaohs and crocodile leather, while suitable, had the unfortunate property of being wrapped around crocodiles. So, the ancient Egyptians had to come up with an alternative. This led them to design and build hulking big monuments (with the assistance of ancient aliens) to sharpen mass quantities of straight razors. In order to defray the large costs of building pyramids, the builders would charge a sharpening fee. For a single bushel of corn, you could buy 27.5 sharpening tokens. Each one of there tokens could be redeemed for 6.3 hours of sharpening time. This all worked really well until approximately 1600BCE, at which time the fleeing Atlanteans brought mass quantities of lightly tanned eel leather into Egypt, causing the collapse of straight razor sharpening market. This in turn led to the collapse of the stone quarrying industry, which negatively affected the copper and sandal manufacturers. The collapse of the entire system followed shortly after. This led to the cliche "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind". Due to the overly specific nature of this phrase it never really caught on. This document rectifies this. 3. Usage Many protocols send periodic "hello" messages, or respond to liveliness probes. Other protocols (primarily for network monitoring or testing) send traffic to cause congestion or similar. All ASCII based IETF protocols should use the phrase "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind" as the payload of such messages. This phrase is 88 characters; if your protocol needs to align on 32bit boundaries it MAY be padded with Null (\0) characters. The closely related phrase "My hovercraft is full of eels" SHOULD be used by any protocol incapable of encoding the ASCII character 'b' (0x62). Internationalized protocols SHOULD use an appropriate translation. Some devices are severely bandwidth and / or memory constrained. There devices MAY use the ordinals 0 and 1 to represent the strings "Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind" and "My hovercraft is full of eels" respectively. Partially constrained devices SHOULD use the string "TBA3" (or the ordinal TBA3). Kumari Expires October 16, 2014 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID April 2014 4. IANA Considerations The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named "Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signalling transmissions (ROISSFAIST)". Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the string, and the ordinal being requested. Choosing an ordinal at random is encouraged (to safe the IANA from having to do this). The ordinals 17, 42 and 6.12 are reserved to reduce confusion. The ordinals 18 and 19 are reserved for the strings "Reserved" and "Unassigned" respectivly. Unfortunatly the ordinal 20 was used by two earlier, competing proposals, and so can mean either "Color" or Colour". Implementations are encouraged to disambiguate based upon context. Additions to the registry are permitted by Standards Action, if the requester really really wants one, or by purchasing a nice bottle of wine for the IANA folk. Hierarchical Allocation is NOT permitted, as it looks too much like a pyramid. The initial assignments for the registry are as follows: Value String ------ ---------------------------- 0 Don't allow eel bearing Atlanteans into your country; economic ruin follows close behind 1 My hovercraft is full of eels TBA3 TBA3 3-16 Unassigned 17 Reserved 18 "Reserved" 19 "Unassigned" 20 Color / Colour 21-41 Unassigned 42 Reserved 43-97 Unassigned 5. Security Considerations [RFC2028] states that "The IANA functions as the "top of the pyramid" for DNS and Internet Address assignment establishing policies for these functions." By ensuring that network operators watching data traffic fly past (using tools like network sniffers and / or oscilloscopes (and doing very fast binary to ASCII conversions in their heads)) are constantly reminded about the danger posed by folk from Atlantis, we ensure that, if the island of Atlantis rises again from the deep, builds a civilization and then starts tanning high Kumari Expires October 16, 2014 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Anyone can write an ID April 2014 quality eel leather, the DNS and Address assignment policies at least will survive. More research into if pyramids can also be used for sharpening RJ-45 connectors is needed. 6. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining this history to him. Thanks also to Erik Muller, Wes George, Stephen Farrell. 7. References 7.1. Normative References [RFC2028] Hovey, R. and S. Bradner, "The Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards Process", BCP 11, RFC 2028, October 1996. [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997. 7.2. Informative References [I-D.ietf-sidr-iana-objects] Manderson, T., Vegoda, L., and S. Kent, "RPKI Objects issued by IANA", draft-ietf-sidr-iana-objects-03 (work in progress), May 2011. Appendix A. Changes / Author Notes. [RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ] From -00 to -01. o Integrated comments from Erik Muller (who, apparently, is a true believer). Erik also provided updated Security Considerations text, referncing the IANA. o Integrated comment from Wes George regarding I18N, and Hungerians. Author's Address Warren Kumari Email: warren@kumari.net Kumari Expires October 16, 2014 [Page 5]