Subject: RE: network controls are necessary

From: "Tony Li" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 11:30:47 -0800

Tony,

|   I was not trying to acuse or label anyone. My point was 
|   that we all are
|   bringing viewpoints based on past expierence, and they can cause
|   particular approaches to be declaired 'too complex' without serious
|   study. 

Yes, I'm aware that we all have biases and that rational engineering 
should dominate the conversation.  Thank you for the reminder.  If you
see us straying from the path, please feel free to remind us again.

|   Simplifying does not always mean moving the function into 
|   the network.
|   In fact that approach may make the host job more complex, 
|   because the
|   network has limited knowledge. 

IMHO, the network includes the hosts.  Moving the function into the
routing subsystem may or may not simplify the overall system.  Our job
has to be to weigh the advantages of the alternatives and weight them
properly.  

|   > Our first job is to define an architecture, not a mechanism.  That
|   > architecture will be able to support some policies, not all.  
|   
|   I agree we can't arbitrarily support all policies, but we 
|   appear to be
|   writing off a significant number of them because the mechanisms that
|   would allow them to fit into the target architecture are 
|   too complex. 

That is bound to happen.  There are an infinite set of policies (my packets
should all go through Phoenix, but only on Tuesdays of months with an 'R' in
them) and we will necessarily support fewer of them than we will have to
exclude.

Ergo, we need to decide which ones we need to support.  To do that we need
to understand which ones are going to have the biggest impact and the cost
for supporting them.  Some policies are easy to support, but no one will use
them.  No point there.  Other policies would be very helpful, but would
require us to carry a great deal of information.  Those we might find to be
too expensive.  We need to make the cost/benefit analysis and make the call(s).

|   Yes we have to choose. My concern is that the vocal 
|   participants are not
|   providing a balanced perspective on the cost / benefit 
|   tradeoffs. Again,
|   this is not to fault anyone, just raise awareness that we need more
|   participation from multi-homed host administrators.

Not to oppose that, but I think that Craig has been a fine representative.  More
are certainly welcome.

Tony

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From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 12:05:23 -0800

Tony Li wrote:
> ...

Again, not to fault Craig or his participation, but he brings a
multi-homed site network perspective. If his host admin counterpart were
also participating, we might get a slightly different view about the
complexity trade-off's.

What I would really like to see is at least one host admin from
someplace with 1/4M end systems, or diverse system types and
manageability requirements like a Boeing, GE, or Sony. 

Tony

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 21:30:40 +0100 (CET)

> manageability requirements like a Boeing, GE, or Sony.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that we shouldn't listen to this
input if it were offered, I don't think this is the right approach. If
we give every network with 250k end systems 10 globally visible prefixes
we'll still have a smaller v6 table than what we have in v4 now.

The sites that now can't even multihome in IPv4 because they don't
qualify for a /24 are the ones that are going to kill us in IPv6.

Iljitsch

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 12:48:15 -0800

I can enumerate the entities that have as many as 250,000 end devices. 
This tells me that they are the wrong target community.  Especially 
since even if we gave them 1000 prefixes each it wouldn't make a dent in 
the routing system.

Eliot

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From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 14:45:54 -0800

> since even if we gave them 1000 prefixes each it wouldn't 

The point was not to get their perspective on impact to the routing
system (we already have enough of that). Rather it was to get their
perspective on realistic scaling properties of host distribution and
conformance to a policy. We are making cost / benefit trade-off's here,
yet there seems to be a FUD campaign to keep one key set of input off
the table. 

Tony

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Dec 2002 15:04:44 -0800

Yes, but perhaps we could expand our focus to include smaller companies, 
such as the Dow 30 components?

Eliot

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2002 00:15:43 +0100 (CET)

On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Tony Hain wrote:

> > since even if we gave them 1000 prefixes each it wouldn't
> > make a dent in the routing system.

> yet there seems to be a FUD campaign to keep one key set of input off

Such large networks can simply use current multihoming mechanisms along
with current traffic engineering and policy expression mechanisms. If we
can create something that works for a 100 host network but not for
anything larger than 1000 hosts because it becomes too complex to
manage, I think that would meet the goals set for this wg. 250k host
networks are always going to be extremely complex to manage no matter
what you do.

Iljitsch