[Nsi-wg] Topology section

[Jeroen van der Ham]

Hi,

On 29 May 2012, at 16:22, John MacAuley wrote:

> Hot dang, a heated debate.  I thought everyone had fallen into a volcano while in Iceland.

Some of the fire from the volcanoes spurred us back to the debate indeed ;)

> I nearly swallowed my tongue when I read OSPF.  I was hoping for something extremely simple that would just allow me to query a peer and control the retrieval of what they know. Something very similar in concept to a protocol like LDAP where I can list the top level branches of the tree (available networks), then do a detailed retrieval of the contents of a subtree (topology for the network).  I would also like to put a watcher on a subtree to be notified when anything was updated.

I have no close experience with LDAP, how does it work with multiple distributed sources of information? What about the subtree notifications?

> I am definitely big on reuse, but if my aging memory serves me correctly, the last time I implemented OSPF in a product it was not a trivial task.  I need a bit more of trivial these days ;-)

I indeed meant an OSPF-like protocol.
It may not be trivial, but it's a proven technology. It has some great extensibility features using the TLV fields.

If that's off the table, we could of course also look into peer-to-peer like systems. There is some great work on distributed storage using distributed hash tables (DHT) that may also be applicable to this situation.

Jeroen.