Re: Auto-tunnel Rant

[Pieter Liefooghe <pieter@info.vub.ac.be>]

Jared Mauch wrote:

> 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.

That is the idea behind the CastGate proposal, it even allows to distribute the
tunnel end-points over your network....the CastGate client will use - if
allowed by your policy -  the Tunnel server reacheable via the least congested
path!
I don't need routers in the proposal, I use PC's who are really cheap as
compared to even basic routers. ;-)

> > 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.

As mentioned above, CastGate Tunnel Servers (and Tunnel Database Servers) are
just PC's located in strategic locations in your network.

>
>
> > 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.

I guess, I will just finish building all my components and let it loose..(give
me another month or so)...we will see what happens ;-)


Bye,

Pieter