Re: [OSPF] IETF OSPF YANG and BFD Configuration

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

[Long delayed response.]

Reshad picked up the key points: Some things may make sense in the
per-client (protocol) users of BFD, some things perhaps do not.  And some
come down to questions for timer granularity.

The OSPF and ISIS models both make use of BFD simply by providing a boolean
that says "I'm using BFD or not".

Where we run into some issues are the cases highlighted: when the sessions
don't share common properties, how should the protocol pick what BFD session
to use?  

The current BFD yang model only permits a single IP single-hop session
to be configured.  (Key is interface/dst-ip)  This means that if different
parameters *were* desired, the BFD model won't permit it today.  However,
BFD sessions for many protocols tend not to be configured, but may spring
forth from protocol state, such as IGP adjacencies.  Thus, it's not
"configured" - it's solely operational state.  However, the BFD yang model
doesn't really make good provision for that as an "on".

Where all endpoint state is known a priori, config state makes better sense.

To pick the example of Juniper's configuration, if OSPF and eBGP were using
BFD, both can choose differing timers.  This represents two pieces of
configuration state for the same endpoints.  Additionally, only one BFD
session is formed using the most aggressive timers.

I partially point out the situation of multiple timers since there have been
prior list discussions on the situation where clients have different timing
requirements.  I don't think we handle this operationally in the BFD
protocol in the cleanest fashion right now - the session will go to Down
when the aggressive timers fail and there's no clean way to renegotiate to
the less aggressive timers.

-- Jeff






On Fri, May 19, 2017 at 02:31:38AM +0000, Reshad Rahman (rrahman) wrote:
> We started off with the intent of having BFD parameters in the applications/protocols which make use of BFD. For timer/multiplier this is pretty straight-forward, although the discussion of what to do when not all applications have the same BFD parameters for the same session (e.g. Go with most aggressive etc). Then we started looking at authentication parameters and having BFD authentication parms in OSPF/ISIS etc is not intuitive. And what do we do if applications have different BFD authentication parms. We concluded that the BFD authentication parms were better off in BFD. And once we did that, the timer/multiplier followed....
> 
> I may not recall all the details/discussons, but I do recall that we went back and forth on this and it took some time to make the decision.
> 
> Regards,
> Reshad (as individual contributor).
> 
> From: Mahesh Jethanandani <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
> Date: Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 5:34 PM
> To: "Acee Lindem (acee)" <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
> Cc: Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, OSPF WG List <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, "[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>" <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, "[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>" <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, "[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>" <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
> Subject: Re: IETF OSPF YANG and BFD Configuration
> Resent-From: <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
> Resent-To: <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, Reshad <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>, <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>>
> Resent-Date: Thursday, May 18, 2017 at 5:40 PM
> 
> Resending with correct BFD WG address.
> 
> On May 18, 2017, at 2:33 PM, Mahesh Jethanandani <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
> Agree with Acee's assessment. After much debate, we decided that we should leave BFD parameter configuration in the BFD model itself, and have any IGP protocol reference the BFD instance in BFD itself. This makes sense specially if multiple protocols fate-share the BFD session.
> 
> Cheers.
> 
> On May 18, 2017, at 12:27 PM, Acee Lindem (acee) <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> At the OSPF WG Meeting in Chicago, you suggested that we may want to provide configuration of BFD parameters within the OSPF model (ietf-ospf.yang). We originally did have this configuration. However, after much discussion and coordination with the BFD YANG design team, we agreed to leave the BFD session parameters in BFD and only enable BFD within the OSPF and IS-IS models.
> 
> We did discuss the fact that vendors (notably Cisco IOS-XR and Juniper JUNOS) do allow configuration within the IGPs. However, the consensus was to leave the BFD configuration in the BFD model. The heuristics to determine what parameters to use when the same BFD endpoint was configured with different parameters in different protocols were proprietary and somewhat of a hack.
> 
> I may have not remembered all the details so I'd encourage others to chime in.
> 
> Thanks,
> Acee
> 
> Mahesh Jethanandani
> [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Mahesh Jethanandani
> [e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>
> 
> 
>