I agree that ISIS testing is critical for core networks because the traffic 
volumes make the impact issue large, but fixing is “relatively” easy.
The small number of vendors (products), with limited configurations and 
reasonably up to date code helps.

But, having bugs and interoperability issues in 10’s of millions of homes, with 
many vendors (products) and code versions spanning a decade…
And  you may not be able to get new software from vendors (some defunct) even 
if you could encourage upgrades.

Not sure how you “fix” this.  You can’t even assume operators can even reboot 
customer owned gear.

This is independent of which IGP.

Who gets the phone call?  Who rolls a truck?


From: Lorenzo Colitti <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Date: Thursday, March 26, 2015 at 2:11 PM
To: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Cc: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Michael Thomas 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Subject: Re: [homenet] T.M.S. proudly presents - Babel: the 2nd implementation

On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 2:00 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Just to be pedantic, my comment was completely serious and not a "hint". New 
implementations almost always suffer from lack of testing of corner cases. Same 
thing with protocol specs. If something exists to exercise those cases, that 
would be good both from an implementation standpoint, and to make certain that 
those cases are sufficiently clear from the spec text.

I have a PDF with hundreds of test cases with red and green boxes for test 
cases the Auto-ISIS implementation has passed or failed. It's currently on par 
with Cisco IOS when it comes to compliance.

So making the ISIS code "work" in the FOSS sense of "working" was easy, making 
it work according to the standard for all kinds of cases took a lot more work.

These are the kinds of tools babel is going to need if we're going to see 
multiple implementations of it from vendors and that they're going to 
interoperate.

No, it is *not* going to need that. IS-IS needs that sort of testing because it 
is widely used on networks that carry substantial parts of the entire 
Internet's traffic, in extremely complex configurations like multi-topology, 
traffic engineering, etc. etc. The reliability required of implementations that 
carry such a burden is orders of magnitude greater than what is needed in a 
home network that in most cases will consist of a few devices that can easily 
be rebooted by the operator.

Home gateway routers routinely have broken implementations and crash all the 
time, and have close to zero testing. What's the point of making the routing 
protocol they run be 100 times more reliable?
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