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."