>> there are isps where a human never types at a router (except to debug) and >> all configuration is programatically generated from enterprise and customer >> data entered by folk from sales to provisioning to address admin through >> sexy gui interfaces. the canonic configuration is the data in the data- >> base, and the classic phrase "the network is the data-base of record" is >> anathema. > Interesting. Does this apply to both edge routers near the customer and > the backbone-peering routers? Are these tools commercial products or are > they developed by each isp?
one i know goes all the way to cpe. none are commercial, too small a market, too few large isps. so all commercial efforts i know failed. note that there are embarrassingly few of these systems. many isps do configure by hand, and some embarrassingly large ones. as the consequence of manual configuration is horrible cost/customer curves as things scale up, those that don't will die in the margin squeeze just as they're dying in long distance minutes today. sometimes, the goddess is just. > To bring this back to the thread, do you think there is a need for a > protocol here or are the current solutions adequate? It must be fun to > keep these tools in sync with sw releases, differences in vendor > capabilities, etc. job security for old hackers! :-) i suspect/hope that 20 years from now we will understand a lot more about infrastructure topology discovery and construction, accompanied by solid underlying theory, and will view this discussion as pretty primitive. of course, we have to live in today. but we should refrain from being cute or complex. randy -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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] --------------------------------------------------------------------
