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

Re: shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)



On 24-feb-2006, at 12:26, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

1) Traffic engineering, traffic engineering and traffic engineering

I guess we'll have to take this one to heart. I believe this means decent traffic engineering must be in the first version of the specs.

I think it should be considered whose problem shim6 is aimed at solving and whose side shim6 development should be one. ISPs want to do TE, customers want to work around it (perhaps).

In my book, TE is evil and ISPs should be lossless and efficient. TE is just evil patching.

In my book, traffic engineering is chapter 6.  :-)

You can read it online: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bgp/chapter/ ch06.html

If you have several links to the internet, you don't want one to sit idle while another is congested. So traffic engineering is an essential part of multihoming. Now obviously most ISPs are multihomed themselves so they want to do their own TE. That's completely legitimate. However, that doesn't mean that they get to decide how their customers can do TE. If a customer sends traffic to an ISP and that traffic conforms to SLAs and accepted congestion control methods, the ISP should deliver the packets. That's their business. But some people at the NANOG BOF expressed a different view: "the law of large numbers only works if I control the large numbers". And: "most small businesses can't single home properly". To which a certain ex area director replied: "that doesn't stop them from doing it twice.
[...] just like us they're all idiots".

Unfortunately, these days, many people take TE to mean "break up my portable address block in small parts". That is one way to do it, and an effective one, but also the least scalable one.

I like the fact that shim6 discourages end users from getting their own address space and AS number just because of redundancy and multihoming, and I definately like the fact that I will be able to move between IPs due to mobility, and keep my ssh session up during this move. I really hate shutting down my ssh sessions just because I go from wireless to wired mode. Without "screen" I would hate it even more.

Well, shim6 isn't really mobility, although you could probably do this with it.

This has to take precedence over some ISPs desire to do TE. Perhaps if their routers could be smaller and simpler due to smaller TCAM space need, they could afford to upgrade their links instead of doing a lot of TE to work around the bw problem. Their job is to move the packets the customer sends to them, and shim6 is an enduser feature and they shouldn't bother about it.

Amen to that.

And I hope they're not using TCAMs for the (entire) IP routing table, because these suckers use lots of power and scale linearly.