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Re: MPLS aware NICs

  • From: Bjørn Mork <bjorn@mork.no>
  • Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 13:32:52 +0200
  • Cc: "McCallum, Robert" <robert.mccallum@thus.net>, "'Puddinhead Wilson'" <puddinghead_wilson007@yahoo.co.uk>, mpls-ops@mplsrc.com
  • Organization: m
  • Resent-Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 08:08:38 -0400
  • To: "Bell, John" <john.bell@thus.net>
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"Bell, John" <john.bell@thus.net> writes:

> 	None that I'm aware of. As Steinar says, you'd have to run a routing
> protocol on your workstation/server for it to make any sense. Equally,
> making an NIC MPLS-aware means writing an MPLS stack in software, so I
> suppose  some guys in a Uni lab may write their own MPLS-aware NIC stack as
> a project, and run "routed" on a Linux box, just to understand whats
> happening. But there will never be a commercial reason to do it, as you need
> to turn your server into a software router. As we all know, this is a crappy
> idea when there are perfectly good (i.e a million times better) hardware
> routers around :-)

Let's say you want to do policy routing on your edge, redirecting some
packets to one or more servers located at a central server farm.  To
do this you need tunnels from the edge routers to these servers.  Why
not use MPLS tunnels?  The servers will have to terminate the tunnels
no matter what protocol is used.  But they don't have to do any
forwarding, and they don't really have to participate in the routing
exchange.

I'd say that popping a label is much preferred to unwrapping ipsec or
gre or whatever, even if you don't qualify as a router ;-)


Bjørn

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