Re: [homenet] Configuration must not be carried by the routing protocol

[Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]>]

> what's a routing protocol?
> a distributed database.

No, it isn't.

A link state protocol implements a replicated -- not distributed --
database within each area.  (All of the local link-state databases
must be exactly identical, or else all hell breaks loose.)

In a distance vector protocol, the set of RIBs of all the routers is
nothing like a database -- every router has a different vision of the
network, since each router has potentially selected different routes.
The only thing that's roughly synchronised is the set of reachable
prefixes, and even that is not fully replicated in the presence of
filtering or aggregation.

> do we need to invent a separate distributed database for each class
> of information?

Yes, because different kinds of information have different
requirements.  There is information that needs to be reliably
synchronised in a timely manner (the link-state DB), there is
information that must be distributed in a timely manner but need not
be synchronised throughout the network (configuration information),
there is global information that is too large to be distributed except
on demand (DNS), there is local information that is not distributed
except on demand (mDNS), and probably many other kinds that I'm missing.

-- Juliusz