Re: An idea: GxSE

[Joe Abley <jabley-ietf@automagic.org>]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 02:16:42AM -0500, Jon (Taz) Mischo wrote:
> I understand your point, but with careful construction this shouldn't be
> an issue.  Assuming you use a link state protocol for the interior portion
> and you allow the border routers to notify the interior routers of the
> egress point, you could move the rewrite closer to the edge.  In fact, if
> you let the initial rewrite occur at the egress router, and then move the
> rewrite backwards into the network, with the egress router indicating
> validity of all recently used routes back into the IGP/other protocol for
> this purpose, you would know where the packets are going.

This may be a trivial point, but I know many "edge enterprises" (i.e.
customers) who have extrordinary difficulty in running an IGP, and
either wind up statically-routing everything within their network
or use a fantastic mixture of RIP, EIGRP and OSPF corresponding to
the various waves of contractors that have been brought in to fix
things at different times.

These people can currently multi-home just fine, since all the multi-
homing smarts are constrained to one or two BGP-speaking border routers,
which is a nice black box that "our BGP guy" can handle without impinging
on the hoardes of other junk connected in the network.

This is just a tentatively-raised red-tinged warning flag: requirements
involving IGPs may prove onerous to end-users.


Joe