Re: draft-dube-route-reflection-harmful-00.txt

["John G. Scudder" <[e-mail]>]

At 12:18 PM -0800 11/5/98, Tony Li wrote:
>As you note, there are route reflector configurations that are not tenable.
>This should have been noted.  However, your avoidance guidelines for this
>problem, if I understand them correctly, are overly restrictive.  In
>particular, in your example, you can see that the IBGP session between
>route reflectors is safe if the membership of R3 and R4 is reversed.  More
>generally, the restriction is that clusters need to be concave: that is,
>the IGP must never compute a path that exits a cluster and then returns to
>that same cluster.

That's a better characterization than ours, thank you.  Our guidelines 
(such as they were) were merely meant to indicate one class of 
configurations that are safe, we didn't mean to say that we had fully 
characterized all safe classes of configuration.  Do you believe that "the 
restriction is that clusters need to be concave" does this?

>Also, it probably should have been emphasized that route reflectors do not
>compute the same results as a full IBGP mesh.  I believe that this is and
>was widely known, and that there are many other opportunities to observe
>this in addition to scenarios similar to the one described in your draft.
>This should certainly be fully documented, if only for truth in
>advertising.

You mean, emphasized in RFC 1966?  Yup.

>My final comment is about the title of this draft.  While I'm well aware of
>the history of the genre that sparked this title, one of the implications
>of the title is the surface impression that you are trying to discourage
>others from employing route reflectors.  I don't believe that you actually
>hold that viewpoint, given the contents of section 7, so I think that this
>choice of title was somewhat unfortunate.

You're right.  Thanks for not saying "juvenile."  My fault.

>I believe that an appropriate way of addressing this comment would be a
>update of RFC 1966.

What's the next step for doing that?

Regards,

--John
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