Re: [RRG] Are we solving the wrong problem?

[Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com>]

Geoff,

I think we're quibbling, but...

> > You're certainly challenging the orthodox notion that the routing 
> > system provides you the best path to get from one point to another.
>
> I can't see that Eliot - it seems close to Shim6 in some ways, 
> although here Mark is advocating a "shim' at the session / transport 
> level of the protocol stack rather than at the IP level. I have my 
> concerns at the robustness and effeciency of a session level approach 
> and see more merit at the IP level, but thats a personal perspective. 
> But thats orthogonal to the properties of a routing system.

Mark is attempting to solve multihoming and TE further up the stack.  
The problem is currently handled at layer 3 by the routing system, and 
many proposed solutions in this group focus on that layer.

> (By the way I don't necessarily believe that the routing system 
> necessarily provides the "best" path. A routing system is a 
> distributed computation environment whose aim is to provide a 
> consistent outcome for all forwarding elements.)

I didn't define the term.  In fact, as you know very well, "best", is in 
the eye of the beholder, but obviously part of the definition should 
include consistency.  A routing system that produces results that are 
optimal or fair to no one would not be deployed.

> >  I don't see anything wrong with that.  But I also don't see anything 
> > wrong with improving the routing system to provide the same function.
>
> I just re-read section 7 of RFC 3221 (Architectural approaches to a 
> scalable Exterior Routing Protocol, dating from 2001). I honestly 
> don;t think we've poushed much beyond the state described then. 
> Personally I think Mark is right to question the scaleability of 
> "monolithic" nature of inter-domain routing when a single distributed 
> computation is applied across the cross product of topology and 
> policy, and whether you attempt to delay some of the computation, or 
> partition it I'm not sure that the total information processing load 
> has altered thereby.

What I attempted to question was whether we could break the "monolithic" 
nature of inter-domain routing into smaller byte-sized chunks and then 
partition the problem such that some portions aren't quite so 
"monolithic".  But again, I don't see anything wrong with pursuing both 
avenues...

Eliot


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