| Internet-Draft | Anyone can write an ID | May 2022 |
| Kumari | Expires 10 November 2022 | [Page] |
Anyone can publish an Internet Draft (ID). This doesn't mean that the "IETF thinks" or that "the IETF is planning..." or anything similar.¶
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This Internet-Draft will expire on 10 November 2022.¶
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All too often, one reads something in the press, or some ravings on a mailing list, referencing some Internet-Draft and claiming that "the IETF thinks that XXX" or that the ID is an IETF document, and so represents some level of support by the IETF.¶
Repeatedly pointing at the RFC Editor page, carefully explaining what an ID is (and is not), 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 father's side twice removed, me, or anyone else believes any of the drivel in it. In addition, the fact that a draft has been around for a long time, or has received many revisions doesn't add anything to the authority - drivel which endures remains drivel. [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 get this published as a (probably AD sponsored) RFC, I guess someone will need to judge consensus at IETF LC ]¶
Readers are expected to be familiar with Section 2.5 of [RFC2410] and [RFC2321]¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
Pyramids are good for sharpening razor blades. The ancient Egyptians had 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. Additionally, camel 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 high 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 their tokens could be redeemed for 6.3 hours of sharpening time.¶
This all worked remarkably well until approximately 1600BCE, at which time the fleeing Atlanteans brought mass quantities of lightly tanned eel leather into Egypt, causing the collapse of the 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 aphorism "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.¶
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. Memory or bandwidth constrained 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).¶
Unlike most IETF efforts, this document is not embarrassed to clearly state that we are simply stuffing more stuff in while we have the editor open.¶
A common source of confusion is the difference between "routing protocols" and "routing protocols", especially when configuring BGP ([RFC4271]) peering sessions between civilized countries and the rest of the world. In order to clearly differentiate these terms we assign the ordinal 98 to be "routing protocols" and 0x62 to be "routing protocols" (but pronounced with a funny accent). Protocols incapable of encoding 0x62 should use the string "My hovercraft is full of eels", a suitable translation of this phrase, or the ordinal 1.¶
Miaow. Miaow-miaooowww. RAWWRRRR! Purrrr.¶
This section was added due to a threat to block any future consensus calls unless the proposers' suggestion to have a section which addressed cats was taken seriously.¶
Normal IETF etiquette would bury this section in an Appendix, in the hope that it would mollify the commenter without actually having anyone actually read it, but the commenter is onto that particular trick...¶
It was pointed out that due respect for openness, fairness, and diversity requires that the section on cats (Section 4.1) should be complemented with a section addressing dogs. To that end, "Woof, Bark Bark, Growl".¶
Note that this particular specification is silent regarding werewolves when the moon is full, and the behavior is left up to implementations (although the author suggests "Run away!" may be a good choice).¶
The IANA is requested to create and maintain a registry named "Registry of important strings, suitable for use as idle signaling transmissions (ROISSFUAIST)".¶
Documents requesting assignments from this registry MUST include the string, and the ordinal being requested. Choosing an ordinal at random is encouraged (to save 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" respectively. Unfortunately, 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 *really* wants one, or by purchasing a nice bottle of wine for the IANA folk. Hierarchical Allocation is NOT permitted, as it would look 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
98 Routing protocols
0x62 Routing protocols
¶
[RFC2028] states that 'The IANA functions as the "top of the pyramid" for DNS and Internet Address assignment establishing policies for these functions.' - this reference to pyramids is clear evidence that the IANA has become corrupted by these Atlanteans, and so extra care should be taken when relying on the above registry.¶
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-quality eel leather, the DNS and Address assignment policies at least will survive.¶
More research is needed into whether pyramids can also be used to make the latches grow back on RJ-45 connectors after they have been broken off by ham-fisted data center operators.¶
Note that feline intervention may cause significant packet loss when utilizing [RFC1149]. This may be mitigated using [RFC2549].¶
The author wishes to thank the ancient elders of Zorb for explaining this history to him. Thanks also to Melchior Aelmans, Andrew Campling, Brian Carpenter, Havard Eidnes, Epimenides, Clive D.W. Feather, Toema Gavrichenkov, Wes George, Stephen Farrell, John Klensin, Erik Muller, John Scudder, Andrew Sullivan, Murali Suriar, 'RegW', Sandy Wills, and Dan York.¶
Grudging thanks to Nick Hilliard, who wanted a section on cats, and threated to DoS the process if he didn't get it.¶
[RFC Editor: Please remove this section before publication ]¶
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