OMB: IPv6 by June 2008

Fri Jul 8 08:03:55 UTC 2005

At 12:51 AM -0700 2005-07-08, Alexei Roudnev wrote:

>  Who need this complexity?  What's wrong with old good _routing rotocol_
>  approach? Memory? (do not joke, today 4 Gb RAM is not a problem, when it is
>  for slow routing system). CPU (the same)? What else?

	Can you put 4GB on every linecard on every router you own?  Can 
you put a Power5 or PowerPC 970MP processor on every linecard on 
every router you own?  Does your vendor support you making any 
modifications/upgrades to any of their linecards, or do they require 
you to buy new ones with the go-faster features?

	And how many tens of thousands of dollars do each of those 
go-faster linecards cost?  And how many million-dollar fork-lift 
upgrades do you have to pay for in order to get the go-faster chassis 
in which to plug those go-faster cards into?

	Do you have thousands of routers?  Hundreds of thousands?

	I'm asking serious questions here.  I'm not a router guy, but 
I've heard a lot of comments on this list that give me pause, so I'd 
like to get real-world answers.

	Speaking from my own perspective, it seems to me that we've got a 
scalability problem here when we're expecting most devices to have a 
pretty complete picture of the entire world.  I think that's the real 
problem that has to be addressed.

	In terms of the routing protocols and number of ASes, we know 
that it's possible to build machines which can handle those kinds of 
things at those kinds of numbers.  The problem is that it's hard to 
do those kinds of things on a widespread basis (e.g., in every 
linecard in every router in the world), and most devices probably 
don't need that anyway.

	I don't know what the real solution is.  But it seems to me that 
we need to find something, and having people say "4GB of RAM?  No 
problem" is not the way to get this solved.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.