Point to Point Ethernet
Ivan Pepelnjak
ip at ioshints.info
Wed Jul 8 13:17:55 UTC 2009
We're halfway there (OK, a bit less, they've messed up OSPF) with the
unnumbered VLAN interfaces.
http://wiki.nil.com/Unnumbered_Ethernet_VLAN_interfaces
What's missing is the removal of MAC layer header, but that would require
modifications to the NIC chipsets (= expensive).
Ivan
http://www.ioshints.info/about
http://blog.ioshints.info/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andre Oppermann [mailto:nanog-list at nrg4u.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:01 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Point to Point Ethernet
>
> A few time already I've wished for a fully standardized and
> vendor interoperable way of doing a true point to point ethernet link.
>
> It would work just like an old leased line or synchronous
> serial interface and completely do away with ARP, MAC
> addresses and all that stuff. Obviously no switches in
> between would be allowed.
> Each side would run in "promiscuous mode" where every
> ethernet frame is received and passed up to the network stack
> (just like on a serial link). Since MAC addresses are
> useless they can be scrapped and only the ethertype field
> remains. This increases the effective MTU by 12 bytes.
>
> The framing overhead goes away and the packet can directly be
> directly placed on the wire without taking a detour through
> L3->L2 lookup and encapsulation step.
>
> More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing
> interface again instead of the next hop:
>
> ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1
>
> Do you think this is useful? Maybe vendors will hear me/us.
>
> --
> Andre
>
>
>
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