Re: draft-ietf-multi6-multihoming-requirements-06.txt

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

    > From: S Woodside <sbwoodside@yahoo.com>

    > Preferably there would be a way to automatically load balance

Load balancing is, fundamentally, a routing issue. You're selecting among one
of several alternate paths.

This is not a routing group, really - the basic consensus seems to be that we
can't efficiently support lots-and-lots of multi-homing in the routing, and
we're going to do it by having multiple addresses, and selecting among them.

So you're asking in the wrong place.


    > (or at least it would be easy to set up even for a naove user.)

You can do some load-balancing by ugly hacks like chosing addresses.

However, I'm afraid your stated goal (load-balancing for idiots) is in
fundamental conflict with one tool that people are currently using to do some
load-balancing, i.e. address selection - address selection is tricky and
doesn't work in all cases, and is therefore inappropriate for a "works for
idiots" mechanism.

Any general load-balancing scheme (i.e. one that would either work
semi-automagically in all cases, or at least one that had a fairly smart user
interface program that would take the user and lead them by the hand) would
have to be i) based on routing, and ii) based on a routing architecture
that's more powerful than the one we currently have deployed.

At which point, see Figure 1.

	Noel