The MPLS-OPS Archive

["McCallum, Robert" <robert.mccallum@thus.net>]

Thinks about what this end device would need to do to be able to do that
properly.

Have a sizable routing table.
Hold a full LIB for the whole network.
RSVP signalling.

Are we going to bring in FRR as well?  

All of the above can be done oddly enough on devices called routers.  Leave
the end device to be noddy and let the magic get done on boxes that it
should be done on.

I still don't see any benefit from an mpls nic.

Robert McCallum 
CCIE #8757 R&S
01415663448
07818002241 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bjørn Mork [mailto:bjorn@mork.no] 
> Sent: 20 August 2004 12:33
> To: Bell, John
> Cc: McCallum, Robert; 'Puddinhead Wilson'; mpls-ops@mplsrc.com
> Subject: Re: [MPLS-OPS]: MPLS aware NICs
> 
> 
> "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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