On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Doug Barton <dougb(_at_)dougbarton(_dot_)us>
wrote:
I have a related-but-different example of how end nodes being able to
know/discover direct paths to one another could be useful. Imagine a
busy server network with some web servers over here, some sql servers
over there, etc. All of these systems are on the same network, same
switch fabric, and have the same gateway address. In an ideal world I
would like them to be able to know that they can speak directly to one
another without having to go through the gateway (and without my having
to manually inject static routes on the hosts, which of course is both
painful and un-scale'y.
Shouldn't that be covered by the subnet mask? As long as they know
they're on the same subnet (and ARP broadcasts will reach everyone)
they should just ARP for each other and not involve the router at all.
If they are on different IP subnets, but the same Ethernet, then we
can either come up with a new way to do routing, or tell people not to
number things that way. Perhaps a subnet mask or CIDR prefix is not
expressive enough?
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf