RE: Auto-tunnel Rant

["Mike Luby" <luby@digitalfountain.com>]

I'm confused by the email that is on these mailing lists.  Are we still
discussing possible standards, or have we moved on to advertisements for
company products?

Michael Luby
Chief Technical Officer
Digital Fountain, Inc.
600 Alabama Street
San Francisco, CA  94110


www.digitalfountain.com
luby@digitalfountain.com
(415) 401-2100 (main)
(415) 401-2120 (direct)
(415) 401-2199 (fax)

-----Original Message-----
From: Pieter Liefooghe [mailto:pieter@info.vub.ac.be]
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 9:32 AM
To: Jared Mauch
Cc: Kevin C. Almeroth; mbone@ISI.EDU;
mboned@network-services.uoregon.edu; ssm-interest@external.cisco.com
Subject: Re: Auto-tunnel Rant




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