Re: Updating the NBD assignment at IANA
On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 02:43:06PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Way back in 2010, I requested a port number with IANA for NBD. They
> assigned port 10809 to it[1]. The procedure to request a port number, at
> the time, also included the requirement to provide a "description", for
> which I gave "Linux Network Block Device", and contact information of an
> "Assignee" and "Contact"; for both of these I passed myself.
>
> Things have moved on since then, however, and I don't think all of that
> is appropriate anymore. So I would like to contact IANA to ask them to
> update the assignment:
>
> - For the "Assignee", I would like to ask them to mention this
> mailinglist. I am not sure whether IANA allows mailinglists with
> public archives to be used in this manner; but according to RFC6335,
> "The Assignee is the organization, company or individual person
> responsible for the initial assignment," which to me means that the
> mailinglist is most appropriate.
> - I'll leave the contact as is for now. RFC6335 mentions "The Contact
> person is the responsible person for the Internet community to send
> questions to. This person is also authorized to submit changes on
> behalf of the Assignee; in cases of conflict between the Assignee and
> the Contact, the Assignee decisions take precedence," which to me
> reads like a person is required (and I'm happy to continue filling
> this role).
I'm reading that as: A person is required for Contact, but cannot
unilaterally override decisions made by the the mailing list as
Assignee. I doubt it will form any conflict in practice (you can
easily forward any contact directly to you back to the list, and the
list has generally been low-traffic and well-behaved with no one out
to commandeer things).
Of course, given the recent xz news, it's always a wise idea to worry
about whether a malicious actor could set up enough sockpuppet
accounts to try and take over list traffic in a way to sway things
different from what the current core developers believe; but in terms
of risk analysis, I don't see the reward (here, the ability to mislead
IANA) as a risk that we need to spend much time fretting over.
> - For the description, I would like to drop the "Linux" part in the
> description. There are implementations of NBD that are wholly
> unrelated to Linux, and so I don't think it's entirely accurate
> anymore to refer to NBD as a "Linux" protocol.
> - At the time, there was no public reference for the NBD protocol yet; I
> plan to add the link to proto.md on github as the official reference.
>
> Thoughts?
Sounds good to me.
>
> [1] https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml?search=nbd
>
> --
> w@uter.{be,co.za}
> wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}
>
> I will have a Tin-Actinium-Potassium mixture, thanks.
>
--
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.
Virtualization: qemu.org | libguestfs.org
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