[282] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: CIDR FAQ
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tony Li)
Tue Aug 15 20:57:46 1995
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 1995 17:50:56 -0700
From: Tony Li <tli@cisco.com>
To: jerry@fc.net
Cc: nmw@news.ios.com, nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199508160043.TAA01740@freeside.fc.net> (message from Jeremy Porter on Tue, 15 Aug 1995 19:43:18 -0500 (CDT))
Uh, I've seen PC's with Gigabytes of RAM, but have yet to hear
of a router with such.
True. There's no market yet.
CIDR is a bandaid.
If you seriously believe that, then you better present some other
mechanism for scaling routing. We know of only one: hiearachical
routing.
The problem is
translating from from BGP to forwarding tables installed in routers.
Sorry, no. There are a number of problems. This isn't one.
Current routers do not have enough BGP processing power to
do the BGP filtering and processing power.
I have about 100 counterexamples. Obviously, you can configure
arbitrarily complex filtering and if you do that, you need an
arbitrarily large amount of compute power. The fact is that there's
enough to work today.
The other problem is the mesh nature of BGP which makes any BGP
peering site, with full mesh peering, an N^2 problem.
This is fixed.
Seeing as memory is typical 1/2 the price
for a workstation as for a Cisco router, you can almost aford to
have 4 BILLION host routes in the workstation, compared to the cost
of the replacing your entire backone with the Cisco of the Month Club.
No one said that you had to buy the memory for your cisco from cisco.
Tony
