nanog mailing list archives
Re: Point to Point Ethernet
From: Andre Oppermann <nanog-list () nrg4u com>
Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:12:52 +0200
On 08.07.2009 18:04, Joe Greco wrote:
More importantly one can specify the just the outgoing interface again instead of the next hop: ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 g0/1 Do you think this is useful? Maybe vendors will hear me/us.No. What makes Ethernet useful and successful is that, unlike most other network/interconnection technologies, it is cheap and plentiful, out of necessity. Any time you have something that is high volume, demand creates pressure to produce more cheaply, and costs slide as volumes spike. There are absolutely "better" choices for point to point circuits, and there are certainly ways to make a point to point version of Ethernet, but doing so invariably seems to involve a lot of reworking of the underlying mechanisms, which means that you've just invented a way to make your special-case Ethernet ... expensive. Anything that can be done exclusively in software, without modifying the silicon, is probably the only practical way to accomplish this. However, then you're still leaving more cans of worms to open, because then there'll be someone who wants to be able to do "something like" this but have vlan support so they can break out an expensive Foundry port on inexpensive switches and still do your new point to point protocol, etc.
This shouldn't require any hardware change. The PHY doesn't care at all and the MAC (Media Access Controller) can be told to ignore the DST MAC address and pass up any packet. So it ends up being only a software change. That is disabling the ARP lookup and the L3->L2 mapping table. I'm not attached to losing the ethernet header as long as a fixed MAC address as destination can be put there and every such incoming packet is accepted. -- Andre
Current thread:
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet, (continued)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Marshall Eubanks (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet William Herrin (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet sthaug (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet William Herrin (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Mikael Abrahamsson (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet sthaug (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet William Allen Simpson (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet sthaug (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Andre Oppermann (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Mikael Abrahamsson (Jul 08)
- RE: Point to Point Ethernet Tomas L. Byrnes (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Randy Bush (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet sthaug (Jul 08)
- RE: Point to Point Ethernet Tomas L. Byrnes (Jul 08)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Saqib Ilyas (Jul 09)
- RE: Point to Point Ethernet Mikael Abrahamsson (Jul 09)
- Re: Point to Point Ethernet Cayle Spandon (Jul 09)