Re: [RRG] Are host-stack modifications allowed or disallowed ?

["William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Tony Li <tony.li@tony.li> wrote:
>  |Can you clarify?  What if the intentions stated by the end user are
>  |only advisory?
>
>  If they are advisory, then the ISP may ignore them.  It was previously
>  asserted that this would be unacceptable.

Tony,

If I want to send a package from New York to Chicago, I can hand it to
UPS and they'll get it there. I won't be able to discuss the routes
the drivers take.

I can also hand the package to a courier, in which case I can probably
discuss the general route he'll take.

Finally, I can carry it myself in which case the package will take
exactly the route I choose.

Why should these routing decisions be mutually exclusive? Why must a
protocol require that all packets follow a top-down routing strategy?

Loose and strict source routing existed in IPv4 for a reason. There
were some security issues, some performance issues and the network got
wider than they could support but they weren't fundamentally a bad
idea. Indeed, if loose source routing was still valid, our map-encap
schemes might not need the encap part at all.

Regards,
Bill Herrin


-- 
William D. Herrin                  herrin@dirtside.com  bill@herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr.                        Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004

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