On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 9:47 AM Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston=
[email protected]> wrote:

> > Of course there is.  You cannot distinguish routing from host without
> looking at external control channels, such as a routing or configuration
> protocol; and you certainly cannot determine the subnet mask of a network
> without that external information, since it's not in the ?> packet.  And
> it's not even in the control plane if the route has been aggregated.  Does
> that make the information "ambiguous"?  The point is that the subnet mask
> of a network is part of a context that you discussed, and you might not
> have it.
>
> This analogy doesn't really work for me.  In the case of an SRH - the
> router acts on the packet based on local configuration - how it gets that
> config doesn't really matter.  The SID size in use by each router may or
> may not be exposed by an IGP for reading - and could differ at each node.


I think Eliot's main point is that there are aspects of a flow's routing
through a network which are observable in a packet and there are aspects
which are not.  Think about a network which implements a flow-based
equal-cost multipath; the determination of which flows take which path uses
information in the packet but the algorithm that hashes it together and
chooses a next hop is not.  The practices about what to choose can vary
significantly and to debug (or plan), you have to know a lot more about the
network than what's in the packet itself.

regards,

Ted Hardie



> In the case of standard forwarding you have a FIB entry - inserted from
> the RIB - that goes a certain place.  In the case of this - a router could
> be using either 16bit SID or 32bit SID - entirely configured locally - and
> dependent on the configuration - will determine if the node in question
> shifts the information by 16 or 32 bits - before the FIB lookup.
>
> Therefore - in a standard scenario - you know that packet X is going to be
> forwarded using a FIB entry lookup of Y - in the case of this - you have no
> idea what the router is actually going to be looking up - because you don't
> know if its going to be doing a 16 or 32 bit sid without knowing the
> specific local configuration on the router.  That’s a very different level
> of complexity in terms of operations and debugging on a large network
>
> Andrew
>
>
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