[rrg] Consensus call: Reject proposed strategy F?

[Brian E Carpenter]

Hi Bill,


On 2008-12-30 09:35, William Herrin wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Brian E Carpenter
> <brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not in fact advocating a 'do nothing' strategy. On the contrary,
>> I advocate that the RRG makes the best recommendations that it can.
>> But I suggest that we should neither accept nor reject strategy F;
>> I think we should just set it aside. It's out of our control anyway.
> 
> Hi Brian,
> 
> My worry is that by retaining strategy F, we signal that the problem
> isn't ripe yet. If plain BGP is not recommended but is still
> acceptable, what's the need for working groups or a concerted
> engineering effort?
> 
> My thought was that strategy D, E or both should remain as controls
> while F should be discarded. D involves scaling up how BGP is
> processed while E involves suppressing BGP growth.
> 
> Do you want to keep F in addition to D and E, or do D and E provide a
> sufficient fallback position as methods for expanding and/or
> controlling BGP?

No, because I think D and E are lost causes anyway.

I think we should just say something like:

It is not known with any scientific or engineering accuracy when
vanilla BGP4 will reach an economic or technical scaling limit (i.e.
when it becomes financially or physically impossible to continue
beefing up core BGP4 routers to cope with growth in the size or
update frequency of the BGP4 routing table). Therefore the RRG
has not considered a "do nothing" strategy, since it is essential
to be ready for this limit well befre it arrives.

         Brian