Thursday, January 28, 2010

Internet Draft: Multicast in MPLS/BGP IP VPNs

Another very interesting Internet Draft was posted today:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-l3vpn-2547bis-mcast-10

In todays MPLS VPN networks, multicast isn't natively supported, but there are some duct-tape workarounds to get it to work (MDT with GRE). Finally a more permanent solution is coming, albeit at the cost of some pretty complex functionality (luckily only in the SP network).

A bit of a long read, but there is some interesting info contained within if you can keep up with the theory.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Another Nice Looking Internet Draft (Hopefully this makes it through fast!)

Extending ICMP for Interface and Next-hop Identification

This is quite the interesting draft that was just posted. Starting out my career from an Operations standpoint, I can definitely tell the authors of this draft are also quite familiar with the struggles of Operations.

Seems as though there are so many folks in the IT/Networking field that just don't understand the hurdles there in Operations, and often makes me cringe at the (terrible) ideas they come up with. Sorry for the rant :)

The key (exciting) point from the abstract:

"The ICMP extension defined herein can be used to identify any combination of the following: the IP interface upon which a datagram arrived, the sub-IP component of an IP interface upon which a datagram arrived, the IP interface through which the datagram would have been forwarded had it been forwardable, the IP next hop to which the datagram would have been forwarded.

Devices can use this ICMP extension to identify interfaces and their components by any combination of the following: ifIndex, IPv4 address, IPv6 address, name and MTU. ICMP-aware devices can use these extensions to identify both numbered and unnumbered interfaces."