Internet Info 1994 March/Internet Info CD-ROM (Walnut Creek) (March 1994).iso/inet/ietf/rdisc/rdisc-minutes-90feb.txt

Text File | 1993-02-17 | 4KB | 105 lines

CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_


Reported by Steve Deering/Xerox Parc, from notes by Jeff Mogul and James
VanBokkelen

MINUTES

This was the second meeting of the Router Discovery (nee Gateway
Discovery) working group.  Jeff Mogul served as acting chair, in
Deering's absence.

The proposed protocol from the December meeting was reviewed.  The
significant features are:

   o It is an ICMP extension.
   o Routers periodically multicast router reports; hosts multicast
     router queries at boot time only.
   o Use of broadcast instead of multicast is permitted but discouraged.
   o A router report does not include a subnet field.
   o A router report includes a holding-time field and a
     preference-level field.
   o In cases where more than one subnet is assigned to the same
     physical network, a router may include multiple addresses (i.e.,
     one for each subnet) in a single router report.

Jeff identified the following open issues:

  1. Meaning of preference levels:
     Nobody seemed to know what to do with more than three levels
     (primary, backup and last chance?).
     Decision:  use 8 or 16 bits, whatever fits in the packet format.
  2. Choice of multicast period:
     Noted that ES-IS uses 10 seconds; we may want slower?
  3. How should router respond to query, unicast or multicast?
     Mike Karels proposed that routers be allowed to attempt to avoid
     unnecessary replies, substituting a single broadcast or multicast
     for several unicast replies.
     Decision:  "keep it simple", i.e., always send unicast replies.
  4. Who writes the RFC?
     No volunteers, so it's still Deering's responsibility.
  5. Do clients dally before sending queries?
     Yes, so that if a LANful of X terminals reboot from ROM at the same
     instant, they don't all hit the broadcast at the same instant.

Other issues raised:

   o Use on non-broadcast media.
     Dismissed as too complicated.
   o Do routers dally before replying?
     Someone suggested that the router dally randomly (mean time based
     on pref level) to avoid overwhelming client.  We argued over

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     whether the clients needed all the possible router responses right
     off.  However, since we don't want to invent a protocol to stop the
     other N routers from responding, we realized that if we were
     already going to expend the resources for N+1 packets on the wire,
     we might as well try to make use of them at the client.  So,
     dallying seems to be wanted.
   o When to query?
     Drew Perkins proposed a minor shift of definitions to allow initial
     query to be sent when a gateway is first needed (i.e., when first
     sending to an off-subnet destination), rather than at boot time.


ATTENDEES

     Ballard Bare             [e-mail]
     Art Berggreen            [e-mail]
     Richard Bosch            [e-mail]
     Ron Broersma             [e-mail]
     John Cavanaugh           [e-mail]
     James R. Davin           [e-mail]
     Farokh Deboo             [e-mail]
     Rich Fox                 sytek![e-mail]
     Mike Karels              [e-mail]
     Tony Mason               [e-mail]
     Keith McCloghrie         sytek![e-mail]
     Bill Melohn              [e-mail]
     Jeff Mogul               [e-mail]
     John Moy                 [e-mail]
     Drew Perkins             [e-mail]
     Michael Petry            [e-mail]
     Mark Rosenstein          [e-mail]
     Tim Seaver               [e-mail]
     Tony Staw                [e-mail]
     James VanBokkelen        [e-mail]
     John Veizades            [e-mail]
     Steve Willis             [e-mail]
     John M. Wobus            [e-mail]
     David Paul Zimmerman     [e-mail]



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