[rbridge] Question about reserved nicknames

[Radia Perlman]

Ah. I'd been doing some last minute rereading of the spec and couldn't 
find what it said to
do with reserved nicknames, but yes...the spec does explicitly says to 
drop if the egress nickname is unknown
or reserved. So I'm glad that that is the behavior everyone wants.

Radia


James Carlson wrote:
> Donald Eastlake writes:
>   
>> The behavior you describe is what was intended for the reserved
>> nicknames with the one minor exception that there is currently no
>> requirement to examine the ingress nickname on receipt of a known
>> unicast TRILL data frame. So an RBridge might not discard such a frame
>> if the ingress nickname was a reserved value. Perhaps that should be a
>> requirement.
>>     
>
> The behavior I'd suggest would be to ignore the ingress nickname on
> forwarding, and drop invalid ones only at egress.
>
> The rationale is that it'll be harder to deploy a future nickname-
> based protocol that requires forwarding if forwarding is disabled now.
> If forwarding is not desired in some future protocol, then the hop
> limit can always be used to prevent it.
>
> For the egress, of course, life is different: you must learn the
> ingress for the source based on the ingress nickname, and that means
> it can't be an "illegal" one.  Some future protocol can (again) amend
> that behavior as needed.
>
>