[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: More TE & SHIM6 (was Re: comments on draft-ietf-shim6-proto-03




El 22/02/2006, a las 16:50, Erik Nordmark escribió:

- OTOH, another option is to use the routing system for policy, in particular, we allow source address rewriting by exit routers and we use the intra site routing to divert the outgoing traffic according to policy and we use the source address rewriting to make the source address compatible with ingress filters and eventually if the peer is willing to reply to the address it received as source locator in incoming packet, this mechanism could be used to influence the locator selection of the other end. In any case, i think that the host may need to be allowed to avoid address rewriting especially due to fault tolerance issues, since the host probably knows better.

There certainly are interactions between the hosts' knowledge of what is working and an implicit or explicit signal from the routers. Did you have specific fault tolerance issues in mind?


Well, i was worried about aggregation and the limitations that this may have w.r.t. fault tolerance, but now thinking it over, i am not sure if this would be a problem.
I was thinking about the following scenario:
Suppose that we allow site exit routers to rewrite source address prefixes.
Suppose now that we inject BGP feed to the multihomed site routers
Now, through BGP routers know which egress path is available and preferred to reach a given destiantion and if this egress path brokes they can select another one through BGP route selection. This would provide BGP fault tolerance. (Clearly when BGP decides to use a different egress path, a different source address prefix is to be used in order to deal with ingress filters, hence we need source address prefix rewriting)

The limitation of BGP fault tolerance is aggregation. I mean, BGP will continue announcing a prefix as reachable, even if a particular address of that prefix just went down. My concern was that BGP may prefer a given route to a prefix, even if the particular address where the traffic is addressed to is unreachable.

However this may not such a problem, since in order to overcome this failure, what is probably needed is to change the _destiantion_ address (not the source address, which is influenced by BGP).

So, probably the distribution of tasks would be:
- both host and routers work on fault tolerance
- the site routers through BGP information select the best available exit path (and select the source address prefix rewriting it accordingly to the exit path selected) - when the host detects a failure, it just selects an alternative destination address (and then the site routing system will select a new egress route accordingly)

I am not sure if additional host-router interaction is needed (i.e. not sure if need to allow the host to disable rewriting as i was claiming before)

In addition, we can configure routers to express policy, like preferring some egress routes towards certain destiantion, just as is currently done. this would affect how the traffic for a given destiantion is routed. In addition, we may need to influence the host when it performs the destiantion address selection, in order to be able to express policy with respect to which destiantion addresses to prefer. This can probably be done with the RFC3484 policy table (if it is considered when performing locator selection, which we haven't discussed yet)


Allowing rewriting the shim6 control packets could be useful especially to benefit from the knowleddge available in the routing system of which routes are available to the destiantion and not forcing the usage of the ISP associated to the source address selected by the host, but i am not sure about the complexity of supporting this...

Which is why I was going to try to write it up in a separate I-D - to see how complex it might be and also understand the issues and benefits around it a bit more.


yes, this would be helpful indeed

regards, marcelo


   Erik