Re: minutes of RIPv2 meeting in Amsterdam

[Jeffrey C Honig <[e-mail]>]

> The use of the Routing Domain in RIP-2 is still unclear.  It was
> determined that the use of the field could not be sufficiently well
> defined to meet the varying needs of those few people who would like to
> use it.  The field also poses difficult MIB problems (discussed below).
> Therefore, it has been decided to remove the field from the protocol
> and leave a Must Be Zero field in its place.  Presumably, a motivated
> person could propose a third version of RIP which would define the use
> of this field.  This change does not, to the knowledge of those
> attending the meeting, invalidate any existing implementations and may
> therefore be made without requiring the specification to remain at the
> Proposed Standard level.

I consider this an acceptable solution, but wonder if my proposed
changes to clarify the use of the routing domain were even discussed?
How about my suggested clarifications of the use of the Route Tag,
CIDR support and selective reception?

> There were two proposed changes to the MIB.  The first was to deprecate
> the Routing Domain object.  It has been pointed out that the tables
> cannot be indexed correctly unless the Routing Domain object was used
> as part of the index.  Given that the Routing Domain field is not well
> defined, this change will result in an overall simplification of the
> MIB.  The second proposal dealt with handling unnumbered interfaces.
> While the RIP-2 protocol does not expressly address them, their
> existance does require consideration since the MIB tables cannot be
> indexed properly with unnumbered interfaces.  The proposal is to use a
> network number of zero and a host number of if_index to create a
> suitable IP address for use in indexing tables.  These changes do not,
> to the knowledge of those attending the meeting, invalidate any
> existing implementations and may therefore be made without requiring
> the specification to remain at the Proposed Standard level.

Come on now, this is a hack, the interface index is not an IP address.
What if the subnet mask was 30 bits long, but I had 10 interfaces?
Interfaces that require an index to identify them do not necessarily
have not have an IP address, and I for one would like to see that
address.

Why hack something up just to push the MIB through to proposed
standard when there are not any implementions.

> There are currently two indepedent implementations of RIP-2: gated and
> Xylogics's routed.  The MIB has been implemented for gated.  ACC has a
> partial implementation of RIP-2 and is planning to implement the
> remainder.

I started implementing the MIB in gated, but did not have time to
restructure my code to keep track of all the necessary information.
Plus I ran into the confusion with Routing Domains and semi-unnumbered
interfaces.

Jeff