> > I say we should tell the folks in GROW that it's time to stop > > seriously entertaining the idea that vanilla BGP (strategy F) > > will work out ok. What do you say? > > Firstly, given that there are useful things to do with BGP, > that will extend its life, I don't think it would at all be > appropriate to tell GROW not to put energy into engineering > improvements. They are focussed on what the short term > problems are, and the easily engineerable fixes (often just > in terms of BCPs, such as Paul's FIB tricks.)
I agree with Joel that it would be seriously inappropriate to tell GROW (or IDR) to stop thinking about engineering improvements to BGP. I can still remember quite well a comment from a "Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures" meeting (the group that preceded the IETF) in the mid 1980's to the effect that "obviously IP routers will not work when the IP forwarding table gets to 10,000 entries". I have similarly been hearing about the imminent failure of BGP for nearly 20 years. Thus I was originally tempted to just ignore this email exchange as "another prediction of doom". However, I think that it is important to point out that the predictions of failure are neither new nor universally believed. The fact that the RRG is exploring other options seems useful to me, and if nothing else can increase our understanding of what other options might be possible. However, I am certainly not ready to confuse "exploring" with either confidence that we want to change the architecture, or consensus on how or whether to do so. Ross _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
