Subject: [i2rs] Questions and suggestions to draft-ietf-i2rs-problem-statement-00

From: Linda Dunbar <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 14:52:58 +0000

Alia, Thomas, and David,

How different is the "I2RS Agent" in the Figure 1 "I2RS Model and Problem Area" from today's router interface agents (like the CLI agent, the BGP agent, or NMS agent)?

Today, you can already use BGP to quickly change/insert routes. I can't find any text in the draft to describe what is the problem of  today's BGP method in changing routes. Is there?

Suggestion:
I think that the draft should be structured in 3 (or more) categories:

-          Policy control

-          Configurations control

-          Route Control

Then, under each category, have a section(s) describing what are the problems of today's approaches.

IMHO, if an application wants to change/insert routes, it should use BGP, instead of messing up the RIB table directly.

For Policy control, yes, there are many applications needing to make quick policy changes to achieve optimal results.

It would be more clear if the draft uses multiple agents on Figure 1: Policy Control Agent; Route Control Agent, and Configuration Control Agent, because some agents could be same as the existing entities on routers.  E.g. the "Route Control agent" could (very likely) be the same as the "BGP agent".

Yours,
Linda