[rbridge] future work

[Donald Eastlake]

Hi,

2010/11/9 xuxiaohu 41208 <xuxh at huawei.com>:
>
> ----- Ô­Óʼþ -----
> ·¢¼þÈË: Vishwas Manral <vishwas.ietf at gmail.com>
> ÈÕÆÚ: ÐÇÆÚ¶þ, ʮһÔ 9ÈÕ, 2010 ÏÂÎç12:01
> Ö÷Ìâ: Re: [rbridge] Several open comments for TRILL's future work
> ÊÕ¼þÈË: zhangmingui 00171239 <mingui at huawei.com>
> ³­ËÍ: rbridge at postel.org, Radia at alum.mit.edu
>
>> Hi Mingui,
>>
>> > For the future work of TRILL. I have the following open comments
>> for your consideration. (Some of them may already have been
>> discussed during the face to face talk with radia.)
>> >
>> > 1. The potential issue of running out of nicknames. We have not
>> seen customer networks with bridges that exceed the magnititude of
>> thousands. However, data center networks and cloud computing are
>> developing so rapidly. It is possible that the 16-bit nickname
>> will be not enough one day. Even it is enough, TRILL has to use
>> algorithms for nickname collisions. When the collisions become
>> frequently, the network may not be used anymore.
>> VM> By then all the Nicknames will be manually configured, which is
>> the way I see the implementations going.
>
> I heard before that one of the obvious benefits of nickname over IP address is zero-configuration. But the reality is...

The reality is that
- there was very extensive discussion of this issue on the mailing list,
- some people like zero-configuration and some like to configure
everything that they can,
- the final result as specified in the TRILL base protocol standard
works for zero configuration, works for pre-configured nicknames,
works for a mix of non-configured and configured, and even works when
the RBridges are mis-configured (i.e., two or more are initially
configured to have the same nickname).

> BR,
> Xiaohu

Thanks,
Donald