The IP over ATM Mailing List Archive by date

[rcoltun@fore.com (Robert Coltun)]

Bert,

	I'm a bit concerned about what we are architecting here.
It is my understanding that many commercial
bridges allow for up to 8K entries which seems like a more reasonable
number but even at that I think the design is a poor one.

It is entirely possilbe to build a large network running IP routing
protocols (OSPF, BGP, CBT, PIM) which function *only* as an IP/ATM overlay.
For example, you could build a 10,000 host system and decompose it into
100 LISes each having 100 hosts. Between the LISes you are running NHRP
so reachability would be equivalent to the 10,000 host flatnet.
This would be much more manageable and would interoperate with
a pure IP forwarded network. It would also give you the neat VLAN
features of associating hosts administratively but not necessarily
physically.

So, I don't see the need for building a NHRP distribution protocol
to scale to 10,000 entries when we have well engineered IP
routing protocols that will allow us to scale much larger than that -
10,000 is somewhat small if we are talking scalable...


Comments?

Thanks,
---rob