RJ, If I understand you right, you're pushing for an approach where we don't say anything about the routing protocol, and wait for the market to converge on RIPng, thus ensuring interoperability. Please correct me if I've misunderstood you.
(My personal opinion right now (subject to change) is that we want a single Homenet protocol, but ensure that HNCP is designed so it is protocol-agnostic. We should make it clear that, while we encourage experimentation with other routing protocols, deploying HNCP with a non-Homenet routing protocol is not Homenet-compliant and doesn't give you the right to put the cool Homenet logo on your router.) > Consumer electronics vendors operate with thinner margins > (e.g. eliminating one resistor makes a meaningful difference in their > profit). Memory footprint and CPU cost matter a great deal to these > manufacturers. I think you're underestimating the amount of RAM and CPU in current cheap routers. The three cheapest routers I can find on Wallmart's website have between 16 and 32MB of RAM and a 300MHz MIPS CPU. That's plenty for running RIPng and Babel, and probably more than enough for a single-area variant of OSPF or IS-IS (Acee, can you confirm?). (The only reason I can see why these routers are unsuitable for Homenet is lack of flash -- some have as little as 4MB.) (Note that these are too slow to push anything close to 100Mb/s, even without firewalling, which, I suspect, is the reason why recent designs have switched to faster CPUs.) > They already have RIP, Do they? Are there any cheap routers that come with RIP enabled by default? > RIP is nearly zeroconf, and adding a link-state routing protocol would > increase both their manufacturing cost and their support cost. > Moreover, RIP scales just fine for residential and even small-business > networks. Just like you, I really like RIP, and could certainly live with RIPng being the One Homenet Routing Protocol. However, RIP(ng) has three major flaws: - the metric is a 4-bit integer, which seriously limits your ability to do fun stuff (like forcing traffic to follow the nice 1Gb/s cabling in preference to the unstable wifi); - the lack of explicit hello packets slows down link detection -- and there's no way you'll do a cool demo unless you can unplug the ethernet jack and have the traffic rerouted within seconds (with RIP, you'll need on the order of a minute, unless you have link-layer indications, which don't work well for other reasons); - RIP is unable to detect unidirectional failures. I don't see the lack of source-specific routing as a serious flaw, since desigining and implementing a source-specific extension to RIPng is probably a job for a day or two (I'm assuming you allow me to copy-paste from Babel and keep me furnished in coffee and food). > So these folks are not likely to add any link-state routing protocol to > their products. While I share your distaste for the "link-state everywhere" dogma, those folks who base their firmware on OpenWRT will add whatever doesn't require configuration and is well supported by OpenWRT. Those who don't are going to swear at us anyway. (Think of it as a consulting opportunity.) -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ homenet mailing list homenet@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/homenet
