Subject: Re: I-D Action: draft-troan-6man-p2p-ethernet-00.txt

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:53:55 -0500

Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > An interesting draft on an important topic, but I think it
    > oversimplifies the problem in (at least) two ways:

    > 1. Even if we had new improved switches and hosts, they would for many
    > years be mixed with unimproved switches and hosts on the old (emulated
    > yellow cable) model. It's already bad enough when you mix switches that
    > do MLD with dumb switches that really do only emulate yellow cable.

I've experienced a switch with broken MLD recently, and it breaks everything
other than IPv6-LL communication... but IPv4 (which uses broadcast) continues
to work!

I think that any well constructed RFC8504 host, given an RA with L=0, will hairpin
all traffic to the router.  
That effectively removes all the multicast dependancies.  This is what all
wifi routers should do, in my opinion.
I think we don't have to have any flag days in theory.
In practice, we will probably find bugs with L=0 on some OSes.

    > 2. I think we should be expect mesh rather than hub and spoke in the
    > quite near future.

    > Which all takes us back to homenet, doesn't it?

Yes, kinda, but kinda not.
I think it could be much simpler for some things.

-- 
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [ 
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        | network architect  [ 
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Dec 2020 16:58:19 -0500

Bob Hinden <[email-masked]> wrote:
    >> yellow cable) model. It's already bad enough when you mix switches
    >> that do MLD with dumb switches that really do only emulate yellow
    >> cable.

    > On my home network, the switches making up the wired portion of the
    > network are not managed nor are they routers.  The mesh router/APs are
    > routers, I suspect that the two Ethernet ports on each node are routed.
    > I suspect that most home and SME switches are not routers.

I think that the majority of people who have switches on the wired portion of
their network are (us) Geeks.
Many of us wish we had managed switches.
(I do: now it's "obsolete" because it needs TLS 1.0 to be managed)

A great deal of the population has the four ports on on the back of their
router/AP.... and believe it not, if they need ore ports, they buy a second
router/AP if they need more ports, and then screw up their network with
either multiple layers of NAT44, or dueling DHCPv4 servers.

So I actually disagree.

    > At least as much as it needs to deal with a mix of what I will call
    > routers with a lot of ports, and generic L2 switches.