[trill] Comments on draft-ietf-trill-smart-endnodes

[Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]>]

I support this draft and have the following comments:

Technical
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It is not made clear how Smart End Nodes learn the Designated VLAN of
the link they are on or, considering the paragraph just before the
Section 5.2 header, the Appointed Forwarder for a VLAN or the DRB. It
seems to me the draft needs to say explicitly that the smart end node
snoops on TRILL IS-IS Hellos. Also, it needs to say that a smart end
node, when encapsulating traffic in VLAN X, needs to use the nickname
of the appointed forwarder for VLAN X, regardless of which edge
RBridge it sends the encapsulated frame to, to avoid MAC flip-flop at
the egress RBridge.

The point paragraph just before the Section 6 header provides two
approaches to handling a hybrid local link (a hybrid link is one with
both smart and non-smart end nodes on it). As a Proposed Standard and
in accordance with TRILL's general design approach, the document needs
to select one and make it be the default.

Section 6 also has two alternatives and does not seem clear.
Presumably there isn't a single link with SE1, RB1, and RB2 on it
since that case is well handled by the smart end node using the
appointed forwarder nickname regardless of which edge RBridge it sends
the encapsulated user data to. So it must be that SE1 is dual ported.
If so, probably these ports have different MAC addresses and I'm not
sure what the problem is....

I think it is inconsistent that IANA Considerations says "Smart-Hello"
while near the start of the draft, the TLV is called
"Smart-Parameters".

"The mechanism for querying a directory is out of scope for this
document." -> "The mechanism for querying a directory is given in
[RFC8171]."

Editorial
-----------

Change ".While when" to ". When"

"nicknamae" -> "nickname"

There are also some other more minor editorial things I can
communicate directly to the principal author.

Thanks,
Donald
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   [phone] (cell)
 155 Beaver Street, Milford, MA 01757 USA
 [e-mail]