Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 21:50:18 -0800
From: Richard Draves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Message-ID:
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| OK, I just submitted the promised draft on this topic...
| If you'd like to check it out early, you can find it here:
It is pretty much as expected - essentially a routing protocol, simplified.
That is, the distinction between a host implementing this fully (your host C)
and a host running "routed -q" is entirely illusory (the protocols have
differences but they're not important ones here).
Unfortunately, as much as we have always preferred for hosts to not engage
in routing protocols, the number that do run routed -q and the obvious
need to do something to handle multi-homed hosts (for which, as the
draft points out, redirects are singularly useless), I suspect that
we really need something like this.
To the details ...
The choice of a two bit signed number as the preference is quaint,
though understandable...
I'm not sure though that this belongs in RA - it is the kind of thing
which I suspect I'd prefer to have a user level application dealing
with, and so having it as a UDP protocol would have a lot of advantages,
even if it currently does gain some advantages by sharing quite a bit with
what RAs already offer at the more primitive level - and that most
likely a host would want to use only one method - this new protocol, or
RAs as its method for finding routers. This is kind of a big
uncertainty in my mind.
I'd probably make the routing info messages variable length though,
padded to whatever alignment needs to be enforced, but not necessarily
to the maximum address length (ie: sending a 128 bit address to say 0::0/0
seems a bit overboard). I wouldn't want to restrict the prefixes that
can be advertised to max 64 bits though, that would be an overly
restrictive optimisation for future flexibility - hosts should treat add
addresses as simply 128 bits masked (other than for autoconf purposes,
when that is enabled).
kre
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