Re: RFC1863 to historic? [Re: [Idr] Last Call on draft-ietf-idr-rfc2796bis-00.txt (fwd)]

Jeff makes a very good point that bears emphasis:

At 11:37 PM -0400 5/3/04, Jeffrey Haas wrote:
>Please note that RFC 1863 doesn't so much define a route server as
>it does a route-reflector style mechanism for route servers.  This is
>the bit that didn't get wide deployment.

For those who haven't gone and looked at 1863 before joining the 
conversation, here is the abstract.  In short, as Jeff has been 
saying, 1863 is an alternative to route reflectors:

    This document describes the use and detailed design of Route Servers
    for dissemination of routing information among BGP/IDRP speaking
    routers.

    The intention of the proposed technique is to reduce overhead and
    management complexity of maintaining numerous direct BGP/IDRP
    sessions which otherwise might be required or desired among routers
    within a single routing domain as well as among routers in different
    domains that are connected to a common switched fabric (e.g. an ATM
    cloud).

While a discussion about other things that are also called "route 
servers" may be interesting, I don't think it's germane to Pekka's 
original question which was whether RFC 1863 in specific should be 
moved to "historical."

I think it should be.  As far as I know there are no extant 
implementations and it's never been (widely? at all?) deployed.  That 
fits pretty well with my understanding of "historical."

I think a good reason not to move it to historical would be if the 
1863 mechanisms in specific are needed/wanted for some current use. 
But discussions of any old thing that happens to be called a "route 
server" misses the point of the original question.

--John

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