[IPFIX] recent ipfix drafts and argus

Mon Feb 27 18:49:56 EST 2012

Hey Benoit,
Well you should pay some attention.  You should know if there is prior art before you start presenting descriptions of technology, and you should give credit to that prior art.  Problem's come up when you present work, and your descriptions look like the prior art's source code, and your examples look like that prior arts program output.   Maybe its just a coincidence.

Argus is free and open source software, and the concepts that you are presenting in your draft were implemented in argus over 19 years ago, so I don't think I'm too worried about IP.  Its just the arrogance of it all that is a little bit of a concern.  IPFIX isn't doing the community any favors if its only authors don't have a clue.

Carter

Carter Bullard
CEO/President
QoSient, LLC
150 E. 57th Street Suite 12D
New York, New York 10022

+1 212 588-9133 Phone
+1 212 588-9134 Fax

On Feb 27, 2012, at 5:52 PM, Benoit Claise wrote:

> Hi Carter,
> 
> After trying to abstract the style of your email, which I don't appreciate, I'm not too sure how to read your email. 
> Is this an IP claim? Or just "I've been doing this for years, so I know better"?
> 
> In all cases, that's a nice advertisement for your company... Maybe it was the point...
> 
> On my side, I certainly don't get my ideas from your products!
> The last time I looked up your web site was at the time of RFC3955.
> In total in my live, I don't think I spend more than 1/2 h on your web site.
> 
> And I don't feel like replying to the details of this email, or even playing the little game of comparing features of your company/my company.
> 
> Regards, Benoit.
>> Gentle people,
>> I'm generally pretty quiet when it comes to IPFIX and its efforts.  But as the first
>> person to develop IP flow records in the 1980's, first to present the idea to the
>> community in 1992, the first to provide open source flow technology in 1995,
>> and the author of the longest lived open source flow system, argus; I feel that
>> I have to say something about the recent wave of IPFIX drafts.
>> 
>> The drafts on flow aggregation describe functionality that the Argus project started 
>> over 20 years ago.  The ideas of key modification, conversion of non-key attributes
>> to key members, aggregation operators, interval distribution and the architecture for it,
>> were all developed in argus a long long time ago.  draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n is basically
>> describing the functionality of argus's racluster(), rasplit(), and rabins() programs,
>> and every example given in the text of draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n can be generated using
>> argus's rabins(), with only a few gyrations of its command-line, today.
>> 
>> I personally would expect that if the IETF was going to describe something that is
>> "Standards Track", that there would be dozen's of implementations of this kind of
>> technology available, and that the WG is condensing years of experience to
>> arrive at a "Standards Track", but, this is not the case.  There is only one current
>> implementation of the complete capabilities of the features of draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n
>> that I am aware of, and that is in argus.
>> 
>> Taking just one of the technical descriptions in the draft, "interval distribution", I
>> am not aware of any description of this issue, or implementation of this type
>> of technology in the literature, outside of argus.  No Google search results for "flow
>> interval distribution".   In Argus we call it flow splitting.  The first line from a
>> Google search for "argus flow splitting" return:
>> 
>> Scholarly articles for argus flow splitting
>> … and prediction of flow statistics from sampled packet … - Duffield - Cited by 217
>> 
>> I'm not saying that Nick knows much about argus's support for flow splitting, but
>> its still pretty scary that the first hit is from a paper that is used in IPFIX documents.
>> One would have to assume that the IPFIX community should be aware.
>> 
>> My problem is that most of  draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n is prior work that is not widely
>> implemented, some of the features are still unique to argus.   While IETF support
>> of technology is a good thing, descriptions of technology without reference
>> is a difficult thing to interpret.  Is the IPFIX WG describing what they think is new
>> technology? Does the IPFIX WG think that many companies have implemented
>> this type of technology, and now its time to standardize it ?  Well, I'm not aware
>> of any implementation, open or closed, that does the complete set of what the
>> draft is recommending, other than argus.  So I don't think its new, nor widely
>> implemented.  I would say its a form of technology plagiarism.
>> 
>> IPFIX is considering adding non-IP flows to their definitions.  Argus is the only available
>> flow technology that has significant non-IP flow data models and support.  argus-1.2 had
>> flow generation, transport, analytics and storage of non-IP flows 20 years ago, with its
>> support for bi-directional ethernet, apple-talk and ARP transaction tracking and reporting.
>> In the last 10 years, argus has added MPLS, VLAN, ISO addresses, and Infiniband flow
>> models.  Not attributes, but true flow key elements.   This work is non-trivial.
>> 
>> The concept that the WG would consider dropping the IP from IPFIX and think that is
>> all that is needed, is really so completely wrong, that its laughable, and a dis-service
>> to those that have done the hard work to bring situational awareness and analytics
>> to non-IP traffic.   The same applies to bi-directional flows, but that is another story.
>> 
>> I would love to think that IPFIX could focus back on flow information exchange.
>> Multicast, non-template based connectionless transport strategies, say over UDT
>> as an example, rather than getting into areas for which the WG is unprepared to
>> do even a reasonable job, without resorting to dubious techniques.
>> 
>> Just a few comments, I hope that anyone finds it useful.
>> 
>> Carter
>> 
>> Carter Bullard
>> CEO/President
>> QoSient, LLC
>> 150 E. 57th Street Suite 12D
>> New York, New York 10022
>> 
>> +1 212 588-9133 Phone
>> +1 212 588-9134 Fax
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> IPFIX mailing list
>> IPFIX at ietf.org
>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipfix
> 

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