Re: policy support [was Re: load-balancing]

[smd@ebone.net (Sean Doran)]

| What this seems to say is that multi-homing needs policy support

Well unless you accept the argument that people are fundamentally
simple so policy better be too, it is pretty easy to foresee lots
of use for, and strong possibility of, increasingly rich and complex
forwarding policies.   Some will attract traffic via particular
paths instead of others; some will send traffic outwards to a prefix
along particular paths instead of others.

| (though how you can tell an Internet2 packet from an ordinary
| one is  a puzzle that hasn't yet been solved other than with static
| routes.)

This is an artefact of fixed-length, strict-format addressing
and a current allocation policy which closely approximates FCFS
in terms of address bit patterns.

A humble proposal: use grep and if you see anything interesting,
it cannot possibly be an Internet2, Abilene, Geant or Star Tap packet.

	Sean.