On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 10:46 , todd glassey wrote:
- In the OSPF vs IS-IS discussions, we decided to pursue two
approaches.
Both survive, with little apparent harm to the community.
And they both offer cricital boundry routhing capabilities - and most
Router
manufacturers support both protocols as far as I can tell.
Note well that IS-IS is *not* an IETF standard. It is an ISO standard.
The IETF IS-IS WG only generates Informational RFCs which are formally
just contributions to the ISO IS-IS standards group. ISO retains change
control over the IS-IS protocol standards.
The IETF picked OSPF. Certain vendors pushed IS-IS onto large ISP
customers,
during the mid-90s, in part to give themselves a proprietary advantage
(at the time only 1 or 2 vendors had a solid IS-IS implementation).
Over time, other vendors desiring to compete in the ISP market segment
shipped IS-IS in addition to OSPF. Quality of implementation of IS-IS
remains highly variable today, IMHO.
But why is the question? If there are people actively working on the
effort
and they want to continue, why is the management making any decisions
as to
which protocols to push?
Interoperability would be one good answer. Having a consistent
Internet Architecture is another. Other reasons also exist.
The cost of persuits is not borne by the IETF though so what's the
point?
Disagree. Cost of having any WG is actually pretty high for the IETF.
It is pretty strongly desirable to minimise the number of active WGs,
IMHO, for reasons of the operational load. That said, I think much
of the community expects decisions to be made to pick one approach
over another approach when the two overlap a great deal.
And number me among those who think that there ought not be a hard
and fast rule on this topic. Instead, local circumstances should be
a major factor in deciding whether to permit competing efforts to
exist within the IETF. (Of course vendor consortia could be created
to take on stuff the IETF chooses not to take on.)
I don't plan to get into an extended dialogue about this, so I plan
not to respond to followup postings.
Ran
rja(_at_)extremenetworks(_dot_)com