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Re: shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Wed Mar 01 11:49:29 2006

On 1-Mar-2006, at 11:22, David Barak wrote:

Also, the current drafts don't support middleboxes,
which a huge number of enterprises use - in fact the
drafts specifically preclude their existence, which
renders this a complete non-starter for most of my
clients.
I have not yet reviewed the lastest shim6 protocol draft, but I've seem discussion around it in which people have talked about middlebox support (in the context of "do we want to leave the door open to middleboxes, or should we insist that this is all done on the host stack?").

My single biggest issue here however is the
complexity: given that today's architecture can
deliver relatively simple and robust multihoming to
enterprises, and rerouting DOES work today for
persistent sessions (albeit imperfectly), what is the
benefit to be gained from doing something this hard?
The current system is complex too, and it will get more complex as the amount of state in the routing system increases. Contrary to what some might think, reading this thread, inter-domain traffic engineering is only achievable using BGP in fairly coarse terms, and the success or failure of the TE tweaks in terms of the desired outcome is often non-determinstic, depending on it does on the routing policies of others.

The current system has the advantage, of course, that its strengths and weaknesses are somewhat well-known.

As far as I can tell, the whole reason for these
discussions is the insistence on the strict
PA-addressing model, with no ability to advertise PA
space to other providers.
The whole reason for the strict PA-addressing model is concern over whether open-slather on PI address space will result in an Internet that will scale.


Joe

(Failing miserably to keep quiet. Must try harder.)