Re: draft-wang-6man-flow-label-reflection

----- Original Message -----
> From: Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org>
> To: Jeroen Massar <jeroen@massar.ch>
> Cc: '6man WG' <ipv6@ietf.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, 18 November 2014, 14:48
> Subject: Re: draft-wang-6man-flow-label-reflection
> 
> 
> In message <546AAD68.4020400@massar.ch>, Jeroen Massar writes:
>>  Why do we need a Flow Label then?
>> 
>>  Please note that a five-tuple is perfectly fine for making up a random
>>  id so that one "only has to do deep analysis work once". This is 
> what
>>  people have been using for as long a they have been doing this kind of 
>>  work.
> 
> And it doesn't work with IPv4 either.  Fragmented IPv4 traffic also
> fails to be correctly forwarded by load balancers which look at TCP
> and UDP ports.
> 
> Just because it works "most of the time" doesn't mean that it 
> isn't
> broken.
> 

And layer 2 load balancing i.e. LAG also fails for either fragments or when the transport layer protocol isn't TCP or UDP. Encoding flow information in the flow label overcomes that issue too.

> Mark
> -- 
> Mark Andrews, ISC
> 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
> PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: marka@isc.org
> 
> 
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