[IPFIX] recent ipfix drafts and argus
Juergen Quittek
Quittek at neclab.eu
Tue Feb 28 04:25:33 EST 2012
Hi Carter,
You know the IPFIX WG for long and our process has always been open.
Aggregation (also referred to as "concentration") was always among
the requirements to take care of by the IPFIX WG, see, for example,
RFC 3917 from 2004.
The open IETF process allows anybody to support technical documents
with solutions, such as ones on IPFIX aggregation. So far, no such
contribution has been made by argus developers or users. This is a
pity, but nothing you can blame any active members of the IPFIX WG
for. If you want to blame someone, then rather blame the argus
community including yourself. You aware of the IPFIX WG and
contributions from you or argus users would have been highly
appreciated.
The IPFIX WG is and will always open for contributions from the
argus community. If you think that a technical contributions from
argus or a reference to argus would improve any of our current
documents, then please contribute to them, as you had already done
in the past. Please particularly do so if you think the way argus
solved technical problems is better than what has so far been
contributed to the IPFIX WG.
While your technical contributions will always be welcome, I ask
you in my role as WG co-chair to stop making harsh statements on
the mailing list, even though the main effect that you achieve
with these statements is discrediting yourself. In particular
I refer to two statements you made:
1. You accuse authors of draft draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n of plagiarism.
Your main reason for this was that you stated "I had the same idea
before" and it's publicly available. I haven't checked if the
ideas are exactly the same, but this is not the point. It does
happen that two people independently have the same idea.
For accusing someone of plagiarism, more evidence is necessary,
at least if you want to be taken serious.
2. You claim that authors of draft-ietf-ipfix-a9n are lacking
expertise. Indeed, there are leading experts among the authors
with high reputation and high expertise in the area of IP
flow monitoring. Claiming they "don't have a clue" because they
don't know argus by heart is a statement that may be valid in
an argus-centric world, but not in the world of the IP flow
monitoring community.
I look forward to your technical contributions for improving the
Standards we are developing in the IPFIX WG.
Juergen
WG co-chair
On 28.02.12 00:49, "Carter Bullard" <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>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
><http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=argus+flow+splitting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&a
>s_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=-8NLT_6lKcnb0QHVs6z7DQ&ved=0CBoQgQMwAA>
>
>
>
>
> Š
> and prediction of flow statistics from
> sampled packet Š
><http://www.google.com/url?url=http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url%3Fhl%
>3Den%26q%3Dhttp://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm%253Fid%253D637225%26sa%3DX%26sci
>sig%3DAAGBfm1Qq9_hOFJINho1051rzZ6qOD5wuA%26oi%3Dscholarr&rct=j&sa=X&ei=-8N
>LT_6lKcnb0QHVs6z7DQ&ved=0CBsQgAMoADAA&q=argus+flow+splitting&usg=AFQjCNFuM
>uC_b45uErbgoPHPab61egoZ3g> - 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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