Robin,

>                Map-Servers needing to make GRE tunnels to a large
>                number (hundreds, thousands) of level 1 ALT
>                aggregation routers - and likewise those routers
>                needing to make GRE tunnels to large numbers of
>                Map-Servers.

        Actually, those numbers (100s, 1000s) are speculation.
        There are many ways folks might deploy this technology
        (e.g, with hierarchy of some kind, as one example). So
        lets see what how people actually deploy stuff before
        speculating on what they might do (and I would strike the
        not-so-parenthetical comment from future discussions). 

        BTW, the RRG (or IETF, or ITU-T, or ATIS, ...) can
        specify any technology they want. However, SPs if deploy
        it, they will deploy it in the way that makes most
        business sense for their particular predicament, and that
        may or may not bear any relationship to what is said in
        SDO deliberations.  And unfortunately, we have precious
        little input from those folks our (SDO) fora.


>                Two Map-Servers for an end-user network's two ETRs
>                will generally link directly (via a GRE tunnel) to
>                the same level 1 ALT aggregation router.  There,
>                the router will (I guess) send packets for this
>                network's EID prefix only to one of these, since they
>                both have the same AS hop count of 1.  Which will
>                depend on the AS number of the ISP.

        I don't know what level 1 ALT means. The ALT doesn't
        carry level identifiers (we thought about this in CONS
        but discarded it for various reasons). And again, just
        like everything else, you build scalability with
        hierarchy. Like every hierarchy, there will be a "top
        level", but not everyone will or needs to connect to such
        a top level.

>                How can an ALT router, such as this busy level 1
>                aggregation router, detect the failure or
>                unreachability of a Map-Server?  I guess it would
>                find out when it tries to send a Map-Request message
>                to the Map-Server via the GRE tunnel.  But is there
>                a keepalive arrangement so the level 1 router could
>                detect the disappearance of this Map-Server before
>                it sends a Map-Request?
> 
>                More on potential problems with caching Map-Resolvers.


        Regarding "upness": You can make the same argument for
        BGP peers in the DFZ (or DNS if you like). In the case of
        BGP, we use BGP keepalives, BFD (if you like), and the
        existence of the route in the RIB/FIB as basically a
        bunch of heuristics, which work pretty well (when was the
        last time you couldn't get to Google because of a routing
        problem on the Internet?). Hence we don't need to
        calculate some exact value of "upness" (which is a good thing).

        BTW, the question "is entity X up" really reduces to
        Zeno's paradox (think: what is the granularity of
        "upness", and how often do I need to ask?). And we know
        what it took to solve Zeno's paradox. But as mentioned
        above, we can do a fine job (within our engineering
        constraints) with clever heuristics. The operational
        Internet is pretty much an existence proof of that.

        Dave


        

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