>From: Tony Li [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >|I do not resonate with your desire that the host should have insight >|into network topology. Perhaps this is because my first protocols were
>|BSC and SNA. I am very familiar with the weaknesses of those systems >|including the operational kludges we had to endure to get them to scale >|into large deployments (e.g., source routing -- ouch!!). The reason I >|became excited about IP almost two decades ago was because IP freed the >|host from having to know anything about the network. In my way of >|thinking, this is a fundamental source of the power and attractiveness >|of IP. Specifically, I do not want the host to know about the network >|design because, whenever such knowledge is required, it ultimately >|creates a configuration nightmare for the large end user. > >Agreed, but in removing the capability from the host, you also lose flexibility >and generality. The strength of IP is that knowledge in the host is not _required_, >but is allowed. We're doing away with that capability. I wondered how you could agree with my point that hosts should not have visibility into the network by design and then state that capabilities to do so were removed from the host. It then hit me that my postings were about normal application data plane functions but you are apparently thinking about network management -- very different topics. I agree that managers cannot know anything about structures that occur at a different recursion layer than themselves. However, this is only one of a large repertoire of problems that make network management very challenging. The current state of network management for the Large End User is very troubling -- ditto for highly mobile networks. I've always viewed this as an inherent failing of network management itself (i.e., the foundation is inadequate) but I concur that map and encaps makes it worse. _______________________________________________ rrg mailing list [email protected] https://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg
