Re: Distribution CPG Protocol

[Stephen Thomas <stephen.thomas@transnexus.com>]

My turn to play devil's advocate.

At 06:00 PM 2001-01-11 -0800, Phil Rzewski wrote: [re attributes of surrogates]

>Indeed, once you've just got a list of numbers, there's really not even a 
>need to name them "Bandwidth", "Disk space available"... you've just got a 
>list of "Genric Metrics". We certainly CAN think of some metrics that are 
>likely to have some use (such as "Bandwidth"), but if we build them into 
>the protocol, we'll just be taking up extra space in the event those 
>specific metrics aren't used somewhere. Since we can't possible think of 
>EVERY metric someone might want to define, we'll need to have a place for 
>Generic Metrics anyway. Why not make them all Generic?

At 06:38 PM 2001-01-11 -0800, Phil Rzewski wrote: [re IP address prefixes]

>There's no law that says that the prefixes advertised through CDNP 
>protocols need to be the exact same prefixes advertised by the routers 
>speaking BGP. I see it as an advantage that someone COULD use the same 
>prefixes (especially for the purposes of getting this up and running), but 
>they don't have to....

Sounds to me like an argument for just shipping around a bunch of generic 
values. If that's the case we can just co-opt, say, SCSP [RFC 2334] and be 
done with it. Or maybe the two parties could just hack together a couple of 
CGI/Perl scripts and run them on a couple of Linux/Apache boxes. Any 
competent CDN operator ought to have folks that could whip that out in a 
couple of hours, which is a heck of a lot quicker than waiting for the IETF 
to charter a WG, the WG to develop standards, vendors to implement the 
protocols, CDN operators to purchase the systems, operators to agree on 
their generic metrics, operators to configure their brand new CDN-peering 
boxes, etc..

Seriously, though I appreciate Phil's reasoning, it's hard to convince me 
that there's any real value in creating a standard protocol that's merely 
transporting generic metrics around.



____________________________________________________________________
Stephen Thomas                                       +1 770 671 1888
TransNexus, Chief Technical Officer    stephen.thomas@transnexus.com