There was some discussion on the conflict resolution draft at IETF97 that got cut off with a request to discuss on the list.
As I understand the situation, we have a misconfiguration in the network, and we are being encouraged to take an essentially aggressive strategy of picking one of the configurations and assuming that must be right in order to continue forwarding traffic. It seems to me that we are tossing a coin here and whilst we could be sending traffic the right way we could also be sending it the wrong way with bad consequences in terms of misdelivery or inducing congestion. The alternative strategy is to note the conflict and not believe either router. This more conservative strategy seems the better approach for a number of reasons: 1) Traffic will not be misdelivered, or use unintended parts of the network. 2) Traffic, was being routed via SR rather than simple shortest path for a reason and so you should not try to guess the operators decision, you should rigidly execute it. 3) It seems to me that the aggressive approach fails 7 of Ross Callons Twelve truths (RFC1925). These were published on 1/April, but the real joke is that they ARE useful truths, so forget about the date. 3, 4, *5*, *6*, 8, probably 10, certainly 12. 4) Finally there is the protocol 101 rule stating that the exception path MUST be simple, because it is rarely executed and thus often hosts most of the bugs. Point 4 is particularly important. What we have in the draft is complex and difficult to test on a live network, and yet it is only there to take action when someone makes a mistake. Exception code like this is usually the Cinderella in the system, rushed in at the end of development and hardly tested. It is usually by far the best approach to assert that the misconfiguration should never happen, have a very simple test do detect it and do something very simple by effective when it is detected. Given that routing only works because routers tell the truth, and clearly one or both of the routers has breached that trust, the best approach is to trust neither. What is unclear to me is what to do with the traffic, i.e. do you degrade it to the base path, or do you drop it. I would think that the latter is the more conservative, because presumably it was put in the SR path for a reason, and so SHOULD be carried on an SR path. - Stewart _______________________________________________ spring mailing list spring@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/spring
