On Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:35:19 -0800, "Tony Hain" <alh-ietf@tndh.net> said:
A thought I had on the plane last night about the disconnect between the NANOG and IETF community which leaves protocol development to run open-loop.
The real problem is that people have unrealistic expectations wrt the IETF. What happened to the "engineering spirit" that dominated the internet-community before it was invaded by telco-guys in the late 90s? A couple points: 1. IETF does not and should not innovate. 2. IETF never did, can not, will not and should not be expected to solve anyone's problem. Sound bad? Not really. The IETF's role is to preserve and protect technology for public consumption. If there's a problem, solve it. If the solution is any good it may have the potential to become a standard later, but the solution should always come first. There are plenty of organisations making paper-standards going nowhere. There's enough people trying to turn the IETF into another useless papermill already. Today there are IETF-standards in progress for which there exist no implementation. Not even experimental code. Such standards are most likely DOA, so why bother? OTOH, NANOG-people should be more involved in core engineering issues. Most nanog'ers, with the exception of those representing small companies which don't separate engineering from operations, belong in the engineering category anyway. The problem is to convince their L8+ that their company never will rule the world alone, and that it may be wise to let their engineers cooperate with competitors on the some of the big issues. //per -- Per Heldal http://heldal.eml.cc/