Re: [Autoconf] what's a router (was: WC consensus call for RFC5889 modifications )

Ulrich Herberg <ulrich@herberg.name> Thu, 05 August 2010 10:28 UTC

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References: <4C528979.7010006@oracle.com> <201008040756.04650.henning.rogge@fkie.fraunhofer.de> <4C596602.1060308@earthlink.net> <201008051039.03011.henning.rogge@fkie.fraunhofer.de> <4C5A82A1.9000806@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:29:20 +0200
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From: Ulrich Herberg <ulrich@herberg.name>
To: Alexandru Petrescu <alexandru.petrescu@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [Autoconf] what's a router (was: WC consensus call for RFC5889 modifications )
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Alex,

>[...]
> To me a router is a device and its software doing this:
> - has a routing table called such.
> - does longest-prefix match algorithm to search in it.  This operation
>  is not specified (no RFC) but it is there everywhere in every router,
>  thanks BSD.
> - includes that route.h I believe as CP said.
> - has multiple interfaces.
>
> In a sense every other host (my Windows PC) is a router because it does all these things.  My PDA, my cell phone, are all routers.

Well, that seems like a strange definition of a router. In a recent
mail of Teco, he summarized the three typical definitions of routers.
And as Henning said, MANET routers may have a single interface and
still perform routing (in the sense of receiving an incoming IP packet
not destined to the receiving router itself, looking up the next hop
from the routing table using longest-prefix match, and retransmission
on the appropriate network interface).

Ulrich