From ogud@tislabs.com Mon Jan 10 15:14:42 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: djb@cr.yp.to Received: (qmail 21523 invoked from network); 10 Jan 2000 15:14:41 -0000 Received: from sentry.gw.tislabs.com (HELO sentry) (firewall-user@192.94.214.100) by muncher.math.uic.edu with SMTP; 10 Jan 2000 15:14:41 -0000 Received: by sentry; id KAA09285; Mon, 10 Jan 2000 10:15:28 -0500 (EST) Received: from dhcp31.gw.tislabs.com(192.94.214.131) by sentry.gw.tislabs.com via smap (V5.5) id xma009276; Mon, 10 Jan 00 10:15:22 -0500 Message-Id: <4.1.20000110092826.06a33d60@sentry.gw.tislabs.com> X-Sender: ogud@sentry.gw.tislabs.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2000 10:19:30 -0500 To: "D. J. Bernstein" , ogud@tislabs.com From: Olafur Gudmundsson Subject: Re: namedroppers mismanagement Cc: randy@psg.com In-Reply-To: <20000108074050.16592.qmail@cr.yp.to> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" At 02:40 AM 1/8/00 , D. J. Bernstein wrote: >this is a complaint to the dnsext chairs about the management of the >namedroppers mailing list. i will wait a few days for a response. No need to wait any further, I will address your complaint right now, and I hope we can quickly work out problems or perceived problems in a civilized manner. > >one of the chairs is the primary culprit, and has already seen and >ignored several complaints; so this message is merely cc'ed to him, and >is addressed to the other chair. A procedural point if you are sending message to one person and cc: others it is helpful to start the message with the intended recipients name that way my mail software will tag the message as urgent and it will not go unread in my mail queue for 2 days. > >in short, to use the language of rfc 2026 section 6.5.1: mismanagement >of the namedroppers mailing list is preventing the ietf dns working >groups from adequately considering the views of their participants, and >is placing the quality and integrity of the working group's decisions in >jeopardy. please see > > http://cr.yp.to/dnscache/namedroppers.html > >for details of specific incidents. After reading this paragraph and before reading the referred page my alarm bells went off and my blood started boiling. I have had messages delayed and even lost when posting namedroppers. Rather than start down a warpath you should be asking me and Randy if there is something better that can be done to manage the mailing list better. TISlabs hosts about 5 IETF related mailing lists and we do a reasonable job of keeping spam down with the use of decent mail list software. But our software does not keep down off topic messages from mailing list subscribers. I will discuss with Randy sometime this week if the mailing list administration should be modified. I will not be able to do it today due to time zone difficulty and my outage for the afternoon to attend a friends funeral. Now to address your "incidents", I would classify them to fall into following categories: 1. Excessive Delay and out of order delivery. 2. Message modifications 3. Off topic postings 4. Security related censorship. I agree that 1. and 2. should not happen, but what is excessive delay I think anything under a day is OK but annoying. Out of order delivery most of the time happens when there are network problems at either mailing list site or the recipients site and there is nothing that can be done about that. Out of order due to moderation errors must be tolerated as long as there are moderators. I agree with Randy that your mail messages where directed to the wrong mailing list. BIND is one implementation of DNS (and not a good one) it is not DNS. I in principle object to your direct questioning(1999-12-31) of which servers can be crashed with an example given in your message, and I think the moderator would have been justified in suppressing it. At the same time I do not know what is the a better forum to ask that question, CERT comes to mind as well as private communication with DNS developers. I strongly disagree with you that the message was urgent, you may have wanted to get answer quickly but this is not a critical question (as for that nothing on namedroppers is that urgent). > >i am not sure if this complaint is within the letter of rfc 2026 section >6.5.1, which seems to focus primarily on previous wg decisions. however, >thomas narten told me to send my complaints to you; i don't see any >other ietf procedure that could cover this situation. anyway, i'd like >to make sure that you've had a chance to respond. I will discuss the issues with Randy and you afterwards, I prefer to work things like this out on the phone so I would like to get your phone number and good times to call you. > >you may be wondering why i'm not first raising these issues informally >on the mailing list itself. answer: i did raise one of the issues in a >previous message to namedroppers; bush censored that message. For the record you are now following the correct procedure. Just remember what I said in the working group in Washington "The main goal of the working group is to make progress on getting our huge backlog of RFC's through the standards process ASAP and fix anything that needs fixing in the documents or any interoperabilty issues." I will not tolerate any disruptions to this agenda BUT any suggestions that help the working group in function better are greatly appreciated. Olafur -------- Olafur Gudmundsson - NAI Labs (443)-259-2389 The Security Research Division of Network Associates, Inc. ogud@tislabs.com Olafur_Gudmundsson@nai.com Private: ogud@acm.org