North American Network Operators Group
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RE: gigabit router (was Re: Getting a "portable" /19 or /20)

  • From: David Schwartz
  • Date: Tue Apr 10 22:35:05 2001 
> CEF should be called Customer Enrangement Feature. It is a very very very
> bad idea to have linecards be anything else than forwarders. They
> should not
> make any intelligent routing decisions. There should not be a
> tons of copies
> of routing table on line cards.  That is what creates problems.
>
> Alex

	CEF allows linecards to be forwarders. They don't make any routing
decisions, they just forward packets according to a routing table. (Routing
= deciding where packets should go, ie building a routing table. Forwarding
= sending packets to their destination, ie using a routing table.)

	The reality is that having only one copy of the routing table creates an
inevitable bottleneck. For the same reasons this won't work on a regional
network, it won't work on a single router if the router is sufficiently
complex. The same techniques that work to scale the Internet as a whole work
inside a box.

	Why do you think central fowarding is superior to distributed forwarding?

	DS