CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Gary Malkin/Xylogics

Minutes of the RIP Version II Working Group (RIPV2)


Agenda

   o Review charter
   o Review RFC 1388 (protocol spec)
   o Review RFC 1389 (MIB)
   o Review implementation experience
   o Review the Demand Routing specification
   o Summary of decisions and actions


Summary

The charter was approved as written.

The use of the Routing Domain in RIP-2 is still unclear.  It was
determined that the use of the field could not be sufficiently well
defined to meet the varying needs of those few people who would like to
use it.  The field also poses difficult MIB problems (discussed below).
Therefore, it has been decided to remove the field from the protocol and
leave a must-be-zero field in its place.  Presumably, a motivated person
could propose a third version of RIP which would define a use for this
field.  This change does not, to the knowledge of those attending the
meeting, invalidate any existing implementations and may therefore be
made without requiring the specification to remain at the Proposed
Standard level.

There were two proposed changes to the MIB. The first was to deprecate
the Routing Domain object.  It has been pointed out that the tables
cannot be indexed correctly unless the Routing Domain object was used as
part of the index.  Given that the Routing Domain field is not well
defined, this change will result in an overall simplification of the
MIB. The second proposal dealt with handling unnumbered interfaces.
While the RIP-2 protocol does not expressly address them, their
existence does require consideration since the MIB tables cannot be
indexed properly with unnumbered interfaces.  The proposal is to use a
network number of zero and a host number of if_index to create a
suitable IP address for use in indexing tables.  These changes do not,
to the knowledge of those attending the meeting, invalidate any existing
implementations and may therefore be made without requiring the
specification to remain at the Proposed Standard level.

There are currently two independent implementations of RIP-2:  gated and
Xylogics's routed.  The MIB has been implemented for gated.  ACC has a
partial implementation of RIP-2 and is planning to implement the
remainder.

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Gerry Meyer's Demand Routing proposal was discussed at length.  It was
agreed that it performed a useful function.  However, Robert Ullman
pointed out that it simulated many of the functions of TCP and that RAP
used TCP. Robert and Gerry will continue the discussion after Gerry has
had an opportunity to read the RAP RFC. The slides from Gerry's
presentation follow these minutes.


Attendees

Steve Alexander          stevea@lachman.com
Michael Anello           mike@xlnt.com
Dennis Baker             dbaker@wellfleet.com
Fred Baker               fbaker@acc.com
Dave Cullerot            cullerot@ctron.com
Bob Downs                bdowns@combinet.com
Dino Farinacci           dino@cisco.com
Vince Fuller             vaf@stanford.edu
David Jacobson           dnjake@vnet.ibm.com
John Krawczyk            jkrawczy@wellfleet.com
Tony Li                  tli@cisco.com
Susan Lin                suelin@vnet.ibm.com
Paolo Malara             malara@crs4.it
Gary Malkin              gmalkin@xylogics.com
Gerry Meyer              gerry@spider.co.uk
Keith Mitchell           keith@pipex.net
Ramin Najmabadi          najmabadi@helios.iihe.rtt.be
Willi Porten             porten@gmd.de
Juergen Rauschenbach     jrau@dfn.de
Benny Rodrig             brodrig@rnd-gate.rad.co.il
A. Velu Sinha            avsinha@attmail.com
Paul Traina              pst@cisco.com
Robert Ullmann           ariel@world.std.com
Douglas Williams         dougw@ralvmg.vnet.ibm.com



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