Re: Draft of updated WG charter

[Jay Ford <jay-ford@uiowa.edu>]

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Paul Lustgraaf wrote:
> > > I think address selection & path selection shouldn't be on the end
> > > system side of the line, so an architecture which causes every end
> > > system in every multi-homed network to do those jobs seems broken
> > > to me
> >
> > you mean the folks who are selling/using the route control products[1]
> > (which allows to select the first hop of the best route) are stupids?
> > I was of the thought that *provider* selection (or path/address
> > selection) should be done by users and not *providers*.
>
> Those are routers, not end systems.  In order to do their job, they
> need to have routing information.  End systems should never have to
> deal with such information.  Any architecture that requires the 20,000+
> end systems on my campus to make routing decisions is broken.

Yep.

> Path selection is the definition of routing.  Address selection is
> dependent on path selection most of the time.  Routers should route.
> End systems should run applications.

You left out layers 4-6, but they still reside in the host.  How
about:
   Routers should do layer 3.
   Hosts should do layers 4 & up.

________________________________________________________________________
Jay Ford, Network Engineering Group, Information Technology Services
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242
email: jay-ford@uiowa.edu, phone: 319-335-5555, fax: 319-335-2951