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

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Juliusz Chroboczek <[e-mail]> wrote:
    > Dear editors, dear group,

    > After the recent thread on this list, and a number of private mail
    > exchanges, I'm under the impression that there might be a consensus
    > that configuration information should not be carried over the routing
    > protocol.  In this mail, I argue that

    > configuration information should be carried by a protocol separate
    > from the routing protocol.

I do not agree with this statement.

I believe that there are significant number of people who believe that
configuration information *MUST* be disseminated at the same time as routing
information.

I understand that you'd like to see a diversity of routing protocols,
specifically, babel and/or ahcp, and as much as I agree with the sentiment, I
think that we need one good protocol, and that's it.

If you feel that babel/ahcp (I'm not entirely sure if we need both) should be
the homenet protocol over zOSPF:  I'm open to that discussion.

I am relatively ignorant of AHCP at this point, I intend to learn by doing, I
hope by the end of the summer.

    > 3.3 A new protocol

    > In the Babel experiment, I have designed a new protocol, which
    > I called AHCP[1,2].  Since AHCP is designed to run before routing is
    > functional, it makes minimal assumptions about the network -- it only
    > requires each interface to have a link-local IPv6 address and to be
    > able to participate in link-local multicast traffic.  An AHCP client
    > implements an increasing diameter search for an AHCP server.

    > The full AHCP implementation (client+server+forwarder, with support
    > for Linux and BSD Unix), consists of 3500 lines of C and 350 lines of
    > bourne shell code, and compiles to less than 40 kB.  Subset implemen-
    > tations are possible.  We have found AHCP to be very robust and
    > reasonably fast even in the presence of massive packet loss.  The
    > traffic generated is very reasonable, even when simultaneously
    > rebooting the whole network.

    > I am not pushing AHCP as the homenet configuration protocol, since
    > I have good hope that a variant of DHCPv6 can be used.  However, I do
    > hope that the results of the AHCP experiment can serve as useful input
    > for this group.

I near you, but I believe that we can not achieve out goals if we do not do
configuration at the same time as loop detection and therefore routing.

Specifically, I think that we will have gaping security issues which will be
very hard to close.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [
]     [e-mail]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [


--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works