RE: Proposed charter, please comment

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

At 01:56 PM 2001-01-26 -0500, Mark Day wrote:

>Do we have any good way to characterize what we want to do with multicast?


Don't know if this perspective will help or just confuse things further, 
but it seems there may be two different multicast-related issues here. The 
first is should any CDI protocols take advantage of multicast for their own 
benefits? In other words, should systems "speaking" CDI protocols use 
multicast when appropriate? To make an analogy to, say, OSPF, this is like 
flooding the link-state advertisements on a local Ethernet. To me, the 
answer seems to obviously be "Yes," but I've been wrong before.

The second issue is should the CDI protocols have explicit support for 
multicasting content? It's not that the CDI protocol messages themselves 
will (necessarily) be transferred via multicast, but rather that the 
messages will carry information about multicasting. To continue the OSPF 
analogy, this would be more like group membership advertisements. Less 
clear on whether that's something worth tackling immediately or not.

Stephen



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