Re: iSCSI: Decimal encoding - why 64 bits ?

[Martins Krikis <mkrikis@yahoo.com>]

--- "Julian Satran (Actcom)"
<Julian_Satran@actcom.net.il> wrote:

> If you fear about extended precision arithmetic you
> should carefully look at
> what key=values are.
> Precluding the use of large numerical values by
> forbidding their encoding is
> not a good way of considering this - we have also
> base64 for large numbers
> (and hex) and if you have to have a use for larger
> numbers you have to have
> the arithmetic to handle it.

Julian,

If this hadn't come up so late, I would even
challenge you to find anybody besides yourself
who is "for large-numerical-values"---my feeling
from reading this list is that people preferred
to just have "binary values" (of arbitrary length)
instead.

> As for the second subject - forbidding the use
> decimals for binary strings -
> we never discussed it or agreed on this.

Many people mentioned it and are still doing it.
The rest ignored the issue and keep doing it.
 
> I wonder how natural it will feel for somebody to
> have and IP address
> encoded exclusively in hex, or a TargetPortalGroup
> appearing as decimal in a
> directory and having to be transliterated.

These are very bad examples. TargetPortalGroupTag
is defined as a numerical-value, so decimal is
perfectly fine for it, it is given in decimal in
all examples in the draft and I certainly would
expect to find it in decimal.

As for the IP addresses, I'm not an IPv6 expert,
but I expect it to be given as an ASCII string 
(and not a binary value/item in some encoding), 
just like an IPv4 address.
Speaking about the latter, we are used to seeing
the octets of this address in decimal, not the
address itself. If you insist on encoding the 
address as a whole (i.e., the 32-bit binary value
that it is), well, please tell me, which is
more natural (although, I agree that both are
awkward): 3228845671 or 0xc0744667? You may want
to feed them to a "host" command, and you should
recognize these addresses. Both get resolved on
my home box. Such tricks used to even work in some
browsers.

Martins Krikis, Intel Corp.

Disclaimer: these opinions are mine and may not
            be those of my employer.



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free
http://sbc.yahoo.com