|
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] iSNS: More Last Call commentsHere are mine. Sorry to be a bit tardy on these but the powers that be decided that I had to spend most of Friday and Saturday packing and unpacking to move to a new office. Thanks, --David ----- Technical ----- -- Section 3.3.2 The iSNS server may refuse SCN service by returning a SCN Registration Rejected (Status Code 17). The rejection might occur in situations where the network size or current number of SCN registrations, has passed an implementation-specific threshold. A client not allowed to register for SCNs may decide to monitor its sessions with other storage devices directly. The "may" needs to be upper case, and this text strikes me as being a bit too cavalier about situations in which iSNS is unable to provide the requested service. A sentence should be added cautioning implementers that both hardware and software resources should be provided in sufficient quantities to make this refusal of service a sufficiently rare case. -- Section 3.4 Need a couple of "MUST"s in this section: - One to require the existence of an administrative control interface for the listed parameters. - One to require the default settings be used in the absence of other configuration (could be a "SHOULD"). -- Section 3.5.2 Will need to instruct IANA (and the RFC editor) to fill in the iSNS DHCP option number when it is allocated. -- Section 3.6 NAT discussion also needs to talk about using "global" addresses/port numbers for services/communication endpoints that need to be accessible. This is for an environment in which the administrator of iSNS knows about the NATs and can configure appropriate static mappings in them so that iSNS operates in the "global" domain and with a little care, everything "just works", even though NATs are involved (in essence, nodes behind NATs have a local address/port that they use for communication and a "global" one that they report to iSNS, with the NAT[s] translating between them). This is a "no free lunch" discussion, as it implies extra overhead in configuring the NAT[s] and care to deal with the fact that an endpoint now has two <IP address, TCP port> address pairs. There ought to be some useful material on this in the NAT RFCs (and possibly drafts) somewhere. -- Section 3.8 The discussion of iSNS database synchronization needs to mention distributed transactions as a way of doing this, although it would be ok to discourage them on complexity/overhead/latency grounds. A maximum of one backup iSNS server SHALL exist at any individual IP address. Why? At a minimum, this needs to be explained. Each backup server should note its relative precedence in the active server's list of backup servers. That "should" needs to be at least "SHOULD" and it may need to be a "MUST" as failure to do this could lead to more than one backup server believing that it is primary after a failure of the active server. If a backup server establishes that it has lost connectivity to the active server and other backup servers of higher precedence, then it shall assume that it is the active server. The method of determining whether connectivity has been lost is implementation- specific. One possible approach is to assume that if the backup server does not receive iSNS hearbeat messages for a period of time, then connectivity to the active server has been lost. Alternately, the backup server may establish TCP connections to the active server and other backup servers, and loss of connectivity determined through non-response to periodic echo messages (using iSNSP, SNMP, or other protocols). "shall" --> "SHOULD", but this is a disaster waiting to happen, as different iSNS implementations will get this just different enough that the result will be split-brain (more than one server believing it's primary) on loss of communication. This area is *hard* to get right (what's needed here is an HA cluster coordination protocol) - an expedient way out for now may be to limit support to one primary and one backup. When a backup server becomes the active server, it shall assume all active server responsibilities, including (if used) transmission of the iSNS heartbeat message. "shall" --> "SHALL", although this is probably editorial. -- Section 5.1.1, 5.1.3, 5.2.1, and 5.2.3 The following attributes are available to support iSCSI. Attributes indicated in the REQUIRED TO IMPLEMENT column MUST be supported by an iSNS server used to support iSCSI. Attributes indicated in the REQUIRED TO USE column MUST be supported by an iSCSI device that elects to use the iSNS. Suggest retitling the columns as "REQUIRED for Server" and "REQUIRED for Client", and noting that the attributes required for a Client will always be used in practice. Similar comments apply to the other 3 requirements tables. All iSCSI user-specified and vendor-specified attributes are optional to implement and use. "optional" --> "OPTIONAL", and add corresponding versions of this to the other 3 requirements tables (this is a recent IESG "hot button"). -- Section 5.1.3 and 5.2.3 What is the difference between NOT USED and RESERVED? A possible guess is that NOT USED will never be used, whereas RESERVED is for possible future use. This needs to be explained, or substitute RESERVED for "NOT USED". -- Section 6.1.1 The iSNSP version described in this document is 0x0001. Say that all other values are reserved. -- Section 6.5 The use of "Multicast" at this juncture will be assumed to be IP Multicast, and needs to be explained earlier. Add an explanation of iSNS Multicast and Broadcast somewhere in Section 3 and reference it here. Need to explain which messages can be Multicast/Broadcast. -- Section 6.6.5.3 Add a discussion of what happens if the iSNS database is updated during a sequence of GetNext operations. Is it possible to lose one's place if an object is deleted? How is a client expected to cope with this? -- Section 7 This looks like it should be retitled to IANA Considerations, with all of this stuff going into registries, and the section needs to be expanded to include things like the BSD from Section 6.5. Some of the material in the table in Section 7.1 may not be appropriate for an IANA registry, though. -- Section 7.2.1 7.2.1 Entity Identifier (EID) The Entity Identifier (EID) is a variable-length field containing user-readable UTF-8 text, and is terminated with at least one NULL character. variable length identifier This field uniquely identifies each network entity registered in the iSNS server. Does this need to be stringprep'ed? "variable length identifier" looks like it escaped from previous editing. Check all other UTF-8 attributes for possible needs for stringprep. By convention, EIDs generated by the iSNS server begin with the string "iSNS:". iSNS clients MUST NOT generate and register EIDs beginning with the string "iSNS:". Replace "By convention" with a "MUST" requirement on server generation of EIDs. -- Section 7.2.3 This field contains the IP Address used to manage the Network Entity and all Storage Nodes contained therein. The Management IP Address is a 16-byte field that may contain either a 32-bit IPv4 or 128-bit IPv6 address. When this field contains an IPv4 value, the most significant 12 bytes are set to 0x00. When this field contains an IPv6 value, the entire 16-byte field is used. If the network entity is capable of being managed and this field is not set, then in-band management through the IP address of one of the Portals of the Network Entity is assumed. What is this IP address used for? Why is an IP address, as opposed to an IP address plus TCP or UDP port? -- Section 7.2.7 The Entity Index is a 4-byte integer value that uniquely identifies each network entity registered in the iSNS server. The Entity Index is assigned by the iSNS server during the initial registration of an Entity. It can be used to represent a registered entity in situations where the Entity Identifier is too long to be used. Explain the requirements on "uniquely identifies", in particular rules about if/when an iSNS server can reuse an Entity Index value. Same comment applies to Portal Index (Section 7.3.7) and iSCSI Node Index (Section 7.4.5). -- Section 7.4.7 Remove DH-CHAP value. -- Section 7.5.3 Remove mFCP value. -- Section 7.7.1 This is a 4-byte field, and is used to provide a FC-4 type during a FC-4 Type query. The FC-4 types are consistent with the FC-4 Types as defined in FC-PH. Byte 0 contains the FC-4 type. All other bytes are reserved. Update FC-PH reference as T11 is obsoleting FC-PH. -- Section 7.9 To avoid misinterpreting proprietary attributes, it is RECOMMENDED that the vendor's own OUI (Organizationally Unique Identifier) be placed in the upper three bytes of the attribute field itself. If the OUI is not used, then some other unique marker recognizable by the vendor SHOULD be used. Should these be REQUIRED/MUST rather than RECOMMENDED/SHOULD? The second sentence is an invitation to problems, and needs to be rethought - Enterprise numbers (as used for MIBs) are a possibility, and there needs to be a way to distinguish whether an OUI or something else is in this field. -- Section 7.11 Standards-Based Extensions These attributes are reserved for future work by other standards bodies. Which attributes are these? I don't see any corresponding entry in the table in Section 7.1. -- Section 8.2 If the iSNS server is used to distribute authorizations for communications between iFCP and iSCSI peer devices, IPsec ESP with null transform MUST be implemented, and non-null transform MAY be implemented. If a non-null transform is implemented, then the DES encryption algorithm MUST NOT be used. "SHOULD NOT be used" is sufficient for DES, also applies to next text: If the iSNS server is used to distribute security policy for iFCP and iSCSI devices, then authentication, data integrity, and confidentiality must be supported and used. Where confidentiality is desired or required, IPSec ESP with non-null transform SHOULD be used, and the DES encryption algorithm MUST NOT be used. "must" --> "MUST", and there are a number of other places in this section where RFC 2119 words need to be in upper-case. Note that the authentication block is used only for iSNS broadcast or multicast messages, and SHOULD NOT be used in unicast iSNS messages. "SHOULD NOT" --> "MUST NOT" here and in earlier discussion of this block to avoid any need for recipients to deal with it in unicast messages. -- Section 8.6 When IPSec security is enabled, each iSNS client that is registered in the iSNS database SHALL maintain at least one phase-1 and one phase-2 security association with the iSNS server. All iSNS protocol messages between iSNS clients and the iSNS server SHALL be protected by a phase-2 security association. This prohibits discarding and recreating the phase 2 associations, e.g., to deal with limited crypto resources. If that was intended, explain why, as keeping the phase-1 ought to be sufficient to maintain the security context.
Home Last updated: Tue Oct 22 21:19:17 2002 11967 messages in chronological order |