Re: MacIP and the Evil NBP Proxy ARP

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>8) The only use of NBP in the protocol would be the registration by
>gateways of their "name:IPGATEWAY@zone" NVE. Hosts would continue to locate
>gateways via NBP lookups of the form "=:IPGATEWAY@zone". The "name" part of
>the gateway NVE can be anything the administrator desires. There is no need
>for it to be the dotted-decimal IP address of the gateway.

I would like to differ with this opinion.  There are many host which use
the MacIP protocol without benefit of a gateway.  These hosts use TCP/IP to
communication between themselves using NBP ARP to find the ATalk address of
their peer.  If you remove this from the protocol this would not work.

It is the case that if a host is using a gateway it should first try to use
the gateway to communicate with its peer.  It would only use the NBP ARP
mechanism if the gateway does not respond.

In looking at the problems addressed in this protocol those that are
interested should look at the work done by the DHCP group since the address
assigning mechanism is very similar.  DHCP also adds the lease time
semantic on assigned addresses and has a solution for the multiple server
case.

The specification for DHCP can be found on sol.bucknell.edu
/dhcwg/draft-ietf-dhc-protocol-march.ps and .txt by anonymous ftp of
course.

John...