Re: Comments on draft-ietf-nfsv4-repl-mig-proto-00.txt

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From: Nicolas Williams (Nicolas.Williams@sun.com)
Date: 12/20/02-04:27:33 PM Z


Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 14:27:33 -0800
From: Nicolas Williams <Nicolas.Williams@sun.com>
Subject: Re: Comments on draft-ietf-nfsv4-repl-mig-proto-00.txt
Message-ID: <20021220142733.J1041@binky.central.sun.com>

On Fri, Dec 20, 2002 at 02:24:11PM -0800, Mike Eisler wrote:
> 
> Nicolas Williams wrote:
> 
> >If the issue is encoding efficiency and there aren't going to be lots of
> >octet streams per packet then PER is probably the best encoding.  But a
> >migration protocol will likely involve sending large numbers of large
> >data chunks with fairly little header overhead, so that the inefficiency
> >of XDR as an encoding will hardly matter.  As Mike Eisler points out,
> >the crypto overhead will be pretty hefty already, so will the encoding
> >overhead be significant?  (As long as XML is not used I'd say "no" :)
> >
> >If the efficiency of XDR does turn out to be an issue, couldn't the
> >encoding be changed later?  Switching to PER would involve using ASN.1
> >instead of ONC RPC, of course, but the structure of the types might not
> >change much...  I rather suspect that noone in this WG will want to use
> >ASN.1/PER though :) , so that leaves ONC RPC/XDR and what else? SSHv2 or TLS
> >
> 
> The use of ASN.1 introduces huge barriers to entry.
> XDR has an open source, free and *complete*
> compiler. Can't say the same thing about ASN.1.
> I'm suprised/skeptical to learn that PER/ASN.1 is
> faster than XDR, but I don't claim to know
> much about either.

I'm not proposing that ASN.1 actually be used for this protocol, but
merely pointing out that there aren't a lot of alternatives.  I don't
think a pure "bytes-on-the-wire" specification is good enough, though a
TLS or SSH-like approach is quite reasonable.  And ONC RPC / XDR is not
unreasonable, IMO.

> >
> >encodings?
> >
> 
> SSH and TLS define an encoding language for themselves,
> but not for their payloads. If there are SSH and TLS hardware
> accelerators, then that's a point in their favor. If
> not, what's the point?

*nod*

> >As for RPCSEC_GSS performance, it may be possible to use a single
> >context to provide integrity/privacy for an entire stream, at the stream
> >level, with each operation referencing a GSS context handle for
> >authorization on the server side.  No?
> >
> 
> That's what I have in mind. I'll follow up today.

Good, very good.


>     -mre


Nico
-- 


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