Re: CAPWAP BOF follow up: nmrg - CAPWAP

["Bernard Aboba" <bernard_aboba@hotmail.com>]

> > Secure boot would be a useful thing to have
>
> but how far does that go toward allowing me to deploy a mixed vendor
> wireless network?
Secure boot is an orthogonal issue.  It's what happens *after* the boot 
imagine is loaded that is important for the purposes of interoperability.

> i believe that a bit of thought will make you suspect that a
> multi-device environment, where different devices have different
> load-balancing algorithms, or even the same algorithms with
> different constants, will lead to serious thrashing.
We see thrashing already even where the devices have the same algorithm.   
For example one vendor who shall remain nameless exports the number of users 
on the AP.  Unfortunately, this causes the clients to associate with an AP 
that has recently rebooted -- which is often the one that has got something 
wrong with it.  This kind of instability can occur with any "load" based 
load balancing algorithm if an AP has a tendency to crash or reboot under 
high load.

To my knowledge, I'm not aware of any implemented products that try to 
determine whether an AP is actually functioning before moving client load to 
it.  This is particularly sad since these same lessons had to be learned in 
Web load balancing over the last few years.  I still remember the "load 
balancing" device that measured response time, only to shovel the clients to 
the server that was responding with "HTTP 404" very quickly.

Given that effective load balancing requires interactions between clients 
and APs, and given the quality of vendor "value add" so far, it would be 
difficult for the IETF to create algorithms any worse than what is already 
shipping in today's products.

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