[rbridge] Questions - VLANs & MPLS

[Dinesh G Dutt]

Hi Kris,

MPLS format was originally considered and rejected for a few reasons. For 
example, we wanted the source and destination RBridge addresses instead of 
only the destination RBridge because of the need to support things like 
IEEE's congestion management, support troubleshooting tools such as 
traceroute and ping within an TRILL cloud etc.

Dinesh
P.S: Please ignore my previous email. TBird decided to use my personal email 
address for some reason. sigh
Kris Price wrote:
> Donald Eastlake wrote:
>> I would suggest that you look at the IETF Proceedings and the TRILL WG 
>> presentations and minutes therein as well as reading the change history 
>> in the base protocol document.
> 
> Will check these out, thanks.
> 
>>     Also, I was curious why MPLS wasn't used as the forwarding method..?
>>
>>  
>> Why should it have? The starting point for TRILL/RBridges was always to 
>> do Layer 2 forwarding based on link state routing as proposed in Radia's 
>> original Infocom paper:
>> http://www.ieee-infocom.org/2004/Papers/26_1.PDF 
>> Nowhere in your message do you state any reason why MPLS would be a 
>> better idea.
> 
> Sorry my original phrasing may have suggested I thought it should.
> 
> I don't necessarily think it should've been used, but it seems it could 
> feasibly be used to achieve a similar outcome. I realise this is 
> simplifying a lot of whats involved though, and I should maybe think it 
> through more.
> 
> So I was curious if it had been considered and rejected and why. Maybe 
> its something thats been given thought previously in another WG.
> 
> I figured the benefits were:
> 
>   * Use of an existing forwarding method
> 
>   * Existing hardware support - this is an assumption. It may not be so 
> simple and may require just as much work as is needed to implement RBridges.
> 
> 
> Cheers
> Kris
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-- 
We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by
the depth of our answers.                               - Carl Sagan