On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 08:51:47AM +0200, Gert Doering wrote: > On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 11:27:12PM -0400, Ross Vandegrift wrote: > > On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 05:00:36PM +0200, Gert Doering wrote: > > > <rant> > > > MST is what comes out if vendor committees get together, and agree to > > > implement the least common determinator in the most complicated way. > > > </rant> > > > > I completely disagree - it's what comes out of solving problems > > related to the LAN - the LOCAL area network. In virtualized LANs, > > there's typically only a few possible physical topologies that can > > exist. MST seeks to exploit this to lower the amount of processing > > power that is required. > > Since MST was standardized long before the "virtualized LAN" environments > were common, this is a nice after-the-fact explanation - but the fact > that *years after protocol design*, networks have emerged that make MST > actually work doesn't make it a better protocol.
I think you've misunderstood me - by "virtualized LAN" I meant VLAN, not VPLS. It didn't take years for these designs to come up - the datacenter we run is a bog-standard, utterly uninteresting case of a few thousand servers, in a few thousands VLANs, with a pair of HSRP routers. The point of MST is to realize that there's never going to be more than two possible forwarding topologies, and computing more is a total waste. It's a perfectly fine protocol at acheiving that goal. I realize you might not care about that goal, and that's okay. I'll go a step further - I doubt that there's a substantially more optimal way to compute only the valid topologies. -- Ross Vandegrift [email protected] "If the fight gets hot, the songs get hotter. If the going gets tough, the songs get tougher." --Woody Guthrie _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
