[rbridge] Fixing Broken Connections in the Middle

[Russ White]

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> This is another reason for me to be nervous about making these changes 
> now. The old method where we did DRB per VLAN, a single pseudo-node for 
> all VLANs that the Rbridge was DRB for seemed sufficient to me and 
> avoided all these issues. We've gotten into this mess because someone 
> decided that sending multiple Hellos (one per active VLAN) is a huge 
> burden on the CPU. I disagree with that assumption and would like to 
> avoid all these issues by falling back to what we had earlier.

IMHO, the mechanism proposed is broken in multiple ways.... I would be
glad to send out a few emails explaining specific situations where this
mechanism of "fixing broken connections in the bridged cloud in the
middle" is, itself, broken. I actually don't think you can fix this
problem--people will find more ways to misconfigure this stuff than you
can account for, or try to work around.

Again, IMHO, it shouldn't be a part of the rbridge spec to fix broken
connections in the middle of a cloud of rbridges. If folks want to
cogitate on the problems involved, and write docs in that area, it's
fine, but it shouldn't be a part of any sort of base specification.

First, there are a ton of different media types involved. Rbridges could
run over wireless media, MPLS, ATM, Frame, IP, and all sorts of other
things. Even if you say: "Ethernet only," there's Ethernet, and then
there's Ethernet.

Let's stop getting hung up on this problem, and figure out how to make
rbridges work at a base level.

:-)

Russ

- --
riw at cisco.com CCIE <>< Grace Alone

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