6bone Registry

[davidk@ISI.EDU]

Hi Andrew,

> Andrew J. Hoag writes :
> 
> On Sep 23, 11:41am, Ran Atkinson wrote:
> > Subject: Re: 6bone Registry
> > Sounds useful to me, except that we ought to insist that tunnels be
> > bidirectional for now (unidirectional tunnels are too hard to test
> > and are of limited value operationally) and keep the tunnel entry
> > format simple, IMHO.
> 
> True, and if we do include the handle along with the addresses of the
> endpoints, that would clear up which was which. We then could eliminate the
> 'src' and 'dst' keywords and end up with something like:
> 
> tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 NAS to 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Cisco
> 
> The insertion of the "to" keywoard could replace "src" & "dst" while still
> delimiting the string somewhat.

I like this idea. You might want to substitute 'to' by <-> for
bidirectional tunnels and ->/<- for unidirectional tunnels (this might be
an academic possibility, but who knows ?). This also avoids alpha-numeric
characters and thus makes it easier for the software (and may be even for
humans) to parse the tunnel line in the right parts.

tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 NAS <-> 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Cisco

> Of course, we can over-engineer this, so hopefully Geert Jan can take our
> suggestions and come up with something we can live with. :-)

We can also do a simplification and see if it makes things more clear or
not. The first site name is not really necessary if the first IP address
is by default local to the site (in this case NAS):

tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 <-> 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Cisco

And one step further:

tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 <-> 192.xxx.xxx.xxx

The IP addresses already determines where the tunnel is going to. The
database software is capable enough of finding the site names that have
tunnels with a certain IP address on run time. This also avoids data
duplication problems which is usually not a bad idea in database design ...

The software could still return with:

tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 <-> 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Cisco

or

tunnel: IPv6 in IPv4 129.99.236.71 NAS <-> 192.xxx.xxx.xxx Cisco

when people use the whois query mechanism for humans (=default mode).

What are the opinions of the other people ?

David K.