Re: [v6ops] BGP Identifier

[Shane Amante <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I'm not casting an opinion either way wrt this specific draft; however, I do wish to make two points below.

On Feb 14, 2014, at 12:13 PM, Sander Steffann <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>>> http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fan-idr-ipv6-bgp-id
>>> "IPv6 BGP Identifier Capability for BGP-4", Peng Fan, Zhenqiang Li,
>>> 2014-02-12
>> 
>> please no.  if you can not assign a unique four octet integer to each
>> router in your network, then you have much bigger problems.  and adding
>> a capability and more complexity to try to patch over your inability to
>> configure your routers will just compound your problems.
> 
> I agree. It's a shame that the router-id looks like an IPv4 address and IPv4 addresses are used to auto-configure it when the operator doesn't explicitly set it. There are too many people that think that a router-id is more than a 32-bit number and must be an IPv4 address, but creating more complexity to avoid educating router operators isn't the answer...

I would take exception to a ROUTER_ID being just a 32-bit integer.  Specifically, when a ROUTER_ID is an IP address that allows an operator to quickly perform diagnosis & troubleshooting using ping/traceroute/etc. to identify the availability and location within the topology of the router purporting to have said ROUTER_ID.

The other question I would raise is, in a far-off future, if we ever manage to get networks converted away from dual-stack and back to a single AFI -- namely, IPv6 -- if ROUTER_ID's are only 32-bits and you lose those capabilities mentioned above ... would you care?

-shane