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It’s not unusual in the life of a network engineer to go entire weeks, perhaps even months, without “getting anything done.” This might seem odd for those who do not work in and around the odd combination of layer 1, layer 3, layer 7, and layer 9 problems network engineers must span and understand, but it’s normal for those in the field. For instance, a simple request to support a new application might require the implementation of some feature, which in turn requires upgrading several thousand devices, leading to the discovery that some number of these devices simply do not support the new software version, requiring a purchase order and change management plan to be put in place to replace those devices, which results in … The chain of dominoes, once it begins, never seems to end.

Or, as those who have dealt with these problems many times might say, it is more complicated than you think. This is such a useful phrase, in fact, it has been codified as a standard rule of networking in RFC1925 (rule 8, to be precise).

Take, for instance, the problem of sending documents through electronic mail—in the real world, there are various mechanisms available to group documents, so the recipient understands what documents go together as a set, which ones are separate—staples, paperclips, binders, folders, etc. In the virtual world, however, documents are just a big blob of bits. How does anyone know which documents go with which in this situation? The obvious solution is to create electronic versions of staples and paperclips, as described in RFC1927. This only seems simple, however; it is more complicated than you think.

For instance, how do you know someone along the document transmission path has not altered the staples and/or paper clips? To prevent staple tampering, electronic staples must be cryptographically signed in some way. In the real world, paper clips (in particular) are removed from documents and re-used to save money and resources. Likewise, there must be some process to discover unused digital document sets so the paper clips may be removed and placed in some form of storage for reuse. Some people like to use differently colored staples or paperclips; how should these be represented in the digital world? RFC1927 describes MIME labels to resolve most of these problems, but there is one final problem that brings the complexity of grouping electronic documents to an entirely new level: metadata creep. What happens when the amount of data required to describe the staple or paperclip becomes larger than the documents being grouped?

Something as simple as representing characters in a language can often be more complex than it might initially seem. RFC5242 attempts to resolve the complexity of the many available encoding schemes with a single coding scheme. Rather than assigning each symbol within a language to a single number within a number space, like ASCII and UNICODE do, however, RFC5242 suggests creating a set of codes which describe how a character looks, rather than what it stands for. This allows the authors to use four principles—if it looks alike, it is alike; if it is the same thing, it is the same thing; san-serif is preferred; combine characters rather than creating new ones where possible—to create a simplified way to describe any possible character in virtually any “Latin” language. The result requires a bit more space to store in some cases, and is more difficult to process, but it is simpler at least from some perspective.

RFC5242 reminds me of a protocol custom-developed for an application I once had to troubleshoot—the entire protocol was sent in actual ASCII text. At least it was simpler to read on the network packet capture tool. There are, of course, many other examples of things being more complex than initially thought in the networking world—which is probably a good thing, because it means those many reports of the demise of the network engineer are probably greatly exaggerated.