Re: Auto-tunnel Rant

[Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net>]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 07:32:48AM -0800, Kevin C. Almeroth wrote:
> Well, I'll add my voice to the rest of the noise.  As I see it,
> auto-tunneling is fine.  Why?
> 
> 1.  Let's not get in the business of protecting people from
>     themselves (in reference to Dino's comment about large
>     fanout is bad...  it is, sure, but who cares?)

	Those of us who are customers of router vendors (not
server/software vendors) have concerns about this impacting our
routers should they spend time creating tunnels.  large fanout
is bad in this case as to get upgrades to the cpu/power in these
takes 18 months as compared to the server market that gets a faster
cpu every few months and it is easier to add extra machines when it's
needed.

> 2.  Let people run whatever they want in their own cloud.
>     To force people to only do network-layer multicast is
>     wrong because:
> 
>        (a) You should be able to do whatever you want (See 1.)
> 
>        (b) We are in a transition period and not every 
>            single device supports multicast.  Until every
>            single device can handle multicast we need things
>            like tunneling (any maybe auto-).  Why?  See 3.
> 
> 3.  An infrastructure that has devices that don't support
>     multicast and so no way for the eyeballs on the other
>     end to see the content is ultimately defeating for
>     multicast.  Yes we can be multicast advocates, but saying
>     that someone can't play in our sandbox because they 
>     haven't bought the latest equipment from Vendor X hurts
>     us more than it hurts the rest of the world.
> 
> In the end:  who cares if there is tunneling?  or even

	I don't care about tunneling, unless the burden gets
palced on my routers.

> auto-tunneling?  Who cares if people expend effort deploying
> non-network-layer multicast?  If they weren't smart enough in
> the first place they probably wouldn't have been smart enough
> to deploy multicast anyway.
> 
> NOW...  the real question is should the IETF be standardizing
> a way to do this?  My intuition...  NO.  Let some clever vendor
> sell a piece of hardware or software that makes it mostly
> seemless.  Done.  It creates pain that is solved by...  
> ta dah:  network-layer multicast.

	:)

	- jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.