RE: network controls are necessary

["J. Noel Chiappa" <jnc@ginger.lcs.mit.edu>]

    > From: "Joel M. Halpern" <joel@stevecrocker.com>

    > One of the reasons I want to keep hosts out of the routing space is
    > that if we ever do find routing solutions that we want to use for new
    > capabilities (QoS or otherwise) I would not want to have to upgrade the
    > hosts as well as the routers to deliver such capabilities.

On first reading this, I thought you were meaning that you wanted to keep
hosts out of any involvement in path selection altogether (which I think is
unreasonable - re-run statement about each car driver making their own
routing choices :-).

But I gather you instead that you simply mean that you don't want to have to
change the hosts (more than once). This is reasonable, but I would go
slightly further: the current routing architecture (i.e. based on exchange of
routing tables) is so broken there's no point in having hosts involved in
path selection until it has been ditched completely.


    > From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>  

    > People sitting in a bus can also be excellent drivers, but that doesn't
    > mean they get to second guess the bus driver. .. Getting routers to
    > work together is hard enough, getting hosts which are much more diverse
    > in every way to do the same is next to impossible.
##  > However, that does not mean hosts should be kept stupid: any task a
##  > host can perform autonomously without adverse effects on other systems
##  > should be performed by the host and not by the network infrastructure.

Exactly! I couldn't have said it better myself (and I'll probably be
'borrowing' this phrase in the future! :-).

The only (minor) change I would make would be to say "{may} be performed by
the host and not by the network infrastructure" - we probably want to provide
the 'vanilla' version of the function somewhere in the network, so the host
doesn't *have* to do it unless it wants to.


Alas, the Multi-6 group has to live with the routing as it is, not as it
ought to be, so this entire point, while of great interest, is purely
academic at this stage.

	Noel