RE: PI/metro/geo [Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming development]

["Tony Li" <Tony.Li@procket.com>]

Tony,

This is blatantly unfair.  As an "arms merchant", I fully want
to sell gear to all interested parties, both ISPs and enterprise
alike.  And, as a certain AD is fond of reminding me, the enterprise
is a very big market.  Why would I want to torque the enterprise?

Instead, I want to help all parties by growing the net in a 
reasonable and scalable way.  That should be what we're all trying
to do here.

The operation issues that I know of NEVER favor restricting topology.
In fact, restricting topology is the result of geographic aggregation
as it forces providers to interconnect within the aggregation boundary.
Operational issues instead favor a haphazard, need driven, cost
optimized topology.  Yes, ok it's chaotic, but it's the result of
capitalism at its finest.

Provider independence isn't necessarily helped only by PI space.
There are other ways.  The real point is to avoid the pain and
anguish of renumbering.  If we were to go down the GSE path, for
example, changing providers simply means changing the "routing gorp".
The host identifier remains the same.  You reconfigure your border
router(s) and you're done.  Infinitely less painful than dealing with
the boring things like acutally bringing up a new tail circuit.  ;-)

You are also assuming that aggregation and multihoming are somehow 
at odds.  They are not.  All you have to do is to disconnect the
locator and the identifier as GSE does and aggregate only the 
locators.  Each host in a multihomed domain has a single identifier,
but multiple locators.  No deaggregation happens because the locators
are bound to the provider and thus we have good topological
'addressing'.  The enterprise doesn't lose because we tweak the
transport to base the pseudoheader on the host identifier and then
let the locator be free to be replaced by border routers.  Connections
flip back and forth between locators easily.

How does this not solve the (non-ideological) issues at hand?

Tony

|   -----Original Message-----
|   From: Tony Hain [mailto:alh-ietf@tndh.net]
|   Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 11:07 PM
|   To: 'Randy Bush'
|   Cc: Tony Li; multi6@ops.ietf.org
|   Subject: RE: PI/metro/geo [Re: The state of IPv6 multihoming
|   development]
|   
|   
|   Randy Bush wrote:
|   > </ad hat>
|   > >> We need to decide which is more important: the scalability and 
|   > >> durability of the routing subsystem or the convenience of 
|   > >> non-connection based addressing.  When we have 
|   consensus on this 
|   > >> point, then all else will follow.
|   > > The answer to the question depends on which side of the 
|   > table you are 
|   > > sitting on.
|   > 
|   > there is little doubt in my mind which side i sit on.  
|   > interesting that tli seems to be on the same side.  but then 
|   > he always kinda groked the operational issues.
|   
|   Operational issues in the ISP space have always favored restricting
|   topology or the knowledge about unaggregated parts thereof. 
|   At the same
|   time, operational issues in the edge enterprise space favor provider
|   independence for maximum flexibility. We have 
|   representative voices for
|   the ISP issues, where are the comparable voices for the enterprise
|   issues? The ISP focus carried round 1, so the allocation policy only
|   allows for strict aggregation via provider blocks. The 
|   enterprise demand
|   for multi-homing is the fundamental issue this WG is supposed to
|   address, but the primary voices are those insisting on maximal
|   aggregation for the ISP routing system. It is hard to 
|   believe this will
|   end up with a well balanced result that considers all the 
|   requirements. 
|   
|   Speaking of, we have a requirements doc that needs to get 
|   published. 
|   
|   Tony
|   
|