CIDR FAQ

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1

  >Then I ask you to sign a nondisclosure agreement. :wink:

  Oh, then the whole argument is for naught. :slight_smile:

Correct. Please fixate on the long term growth rate. That is key.
Unless you want your PC to have Gigabytes of RAM.

Tony

Uh, I've seen PC's with Gigabytes of RAM, but have yet to hear
of a router with such. CIDR is a bandaid. The problem is
translating from from BGP to forwarding tables installed in routers.

Current routers do not have enough BGP processing power to
do the BGP filtering and processing power.

The other problem is the mesh nature of BGP which makes any BGP
peering site, with full mesh peering, an N^2 problem. By utilizing
BGP "proxies", i.e. RS or Gated workstations, you can reduce the complexity
of packet forwarding to a limit of the number of routes, and the
number of updates (and RS or Gated workstations could impletement
routing flap dampening). Seeing as memory is typical 1/2 the price
for a workstation as for a Cisco router, you can almost aford to
have 4 BILLION host routes in the workstation, compared to the cost
of the replacing your entire backone with the Cisco of the Month Club.

(Hm... thinking on this, a Cisco 7000 with just Ethernet, and 64Megs
of memory, could work as a proxy BGP also.).

2

Uh, I've seen PC's with Gigabytes of RAM, but have yet to hear
   of a router with such.

True. There's no market yet.

   CIDR is a bandaid.

If you seriously believe that, then you better present some other
mechanism for scaling routing. We know of only one: hiearachical
routing.

   The problem is
   translating from from BGP to forwarding tables installed in routers.

Sorry, no. There are a number of problems. This isn't one.

   Current routers do not have enough BGP processing power to
   do the BGP filtering and processing power.

I have about 100 counterexamples. Obviously, you can configure
arbitrarily complex filtering and if you do that, you need an
arbitrarily large amount of compute power. The fact is that there's
enough to work today.

   The other problem is the mesh nature of BGP which makes any BGP
   peering site, with full mesh peering, an N^2 problem.

This is fixed.

   Seeing as memory is typical 1/2 the price
   for a workstation as for a Cisco router, you can almost aford to
   have 4 BILLION host routes in the workstation, compared to the cost
   of the replacing your entire backone with the Cisco of the Month Club.

No one said that you had to buy the memory for your cisco from cisco.

Tony