> >Jarno answered this one I think, but my point is that *they don't need to >know*. They just behave the same way in all cases, and the traffic that >doesn't carry fine-grain flow labels will just not get load balanced.
The problem is that the traffic that "doesn't carry fine-grain flow labels" will still get sent through the load balancing mechanics, and packets with the same flow label will still get forwarded the same way. This is probably fine if a few related TCP connections are labelled with the same flow label, or something like that. It would be very bad, though, if the flow label were used, for example, to tag packets that contain a TCP SYN, or packets that contain IP options, or all HTTP packets, or packets that want a certain class of services, etc. My largest problem with this draft is that I think it is needlessly complex... What is wrong with specifying a simple default flow label mechanism, and requiring an API switch to override the values for each flow? Margaret -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
