RIPE Action 21.9: proposal for an ext. of inet-rtr (Mbone R.)

["Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet" <]

  There is a fairly old action on Eric-Jan and me to circulate a proposal
  on extending the definition for the RIPE Database router object inet-rtr: 

  The original definition is documented in ripe-122.
  
  The background for the proposed extension is the discussion about
  documenting the routing of "overlay" networks, most prominently the Mbone.
  
  Quite a while ago Erik-Jan Bos circulated a proposal to extend inet-rtr:
  with an mpeer: attribute. This proposed mpeer: attribute is/was intended
  to specifically document Mbone DVMRP tunnels.

  [ I'm going to re-distribute this paper in a separate message 
    for those of you who don't have a copy readily available ]
	  
  Further discussion revealed that by rearranging and extending the
  definition of the *existing* peer: attribute there is a possibility to
  make the concept even more general and potentially covering IP over IP,
  STUN, whatever. At the same time we could avoid inventing just another
  attribute. 

  The current use of the attribute is:
  
    peer: <Peer address> <Peer AS> <Routing Protocol> [localAS ASnumber]
  
  The generalisation would involve changing that definition to
  
    peer: <Peer address> <Peer protocol> <peer-proto-specific info>
  
  So for the good old BGP peering this might then look like:
  
    peer: 192.87.4.6  BGP4  AS2122  localAS AS2121
  
  for an Mbone tunnel this might be
  
    peer: 192.87.4.6  DVMRP  metric thresh
  
  and for an IP-over-IP even
  
    peer: 192.87.4.6  IP 
  
  Unfortunately this approach would require a non-compatible change to
  the existing peer: attribute. 

  How many tools would be affected?  What's the expected effort to fix
  these tools?

  Your opinions and input wrt to the concept and the proposal to change
  the peer: definiton for BGP peerings is appreciated - before we spend
  too much effort on the details....
  
  Regards
  Wilfried
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  Wilfried Woeber                :  e-mail: Woeber@localhost
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