[e2e] It's all my fault

David P. Reed dpreed at reed.com
Fri May 11 20:07:44 PDT 2007


As the person who argued for source routing in the original design, I 
guess I must confess that I am the devil incarnate.   Steve Crocker and 
others will probably want to join me at the guillotine.

Apparently the Vixie and other paranoiacs and vigilantes have gotten it 
into their heads that RH0 in IPv6 is one "denial of service on steroids" 
and should be deleted immediately.

SInce source routing has many benefits, as those of us (such as Dave 
Farber) have advocated, one might hope that there would be rational 
folks who would consider this as a balanced issue.

But since the "security" experts (who never saw a deep packet inspection 
they didn't love) have decided that firewalls can intuit intent 100% 
correctly merely by inspecting bits, they have decided to declare that 
single path routing is by definition optimal and good enough for all users.

By all means, recreate the fixed-route bellhead net of 1969.   And 
please, let's have the middleboxes decide what messages we ought to be 
allowed to send - after all, the brilliant routerheads know that us 
"lusers" at the edge of the net are stupid fools who should never be 
allowed to actually run any applications that they haven't anticipated.

All Hail Paul Vixie!   Heil Paul!





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