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Re: Flow label and its uses

Fred Baker wrote:
personally, I would label it reserved. I think the authors of RFC 3697 see it as something akin to a 20 bit DSCP, and if someone wants to see it that way it's fine by me. In any event, that is an ipv6wg question more than a v6ops question. 

Indeed. And it isn't "reserved"; it *is* part of the header with the
semantics defined to the extent of RFC 3697. My point is that people
who want to use it, e.g. for load balancing, ought to be writing
drafts.

   Brian



On Jan 17, 2006, at 3:50 PM, Bora Akyol wrote:


A pointer to some reference material on NIMROD:

http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/nimrod/nimsl.html

http://ana-3.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/nimrod/docs.html

http://www.ir.bbn.com/projects/nimrod

Is there any use in keeping flow label as is,
or should be relabeled as "Reserved"?

I think there is some agreement that
the label in
(Label, IP Source Address, IP Destination Address)
triplet does not add a whole lot of value.

Regards,

Bora



-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Baker [mailto:fred@cisco.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2006 3:33 PM
To: Bora Akyol
Cc: Vishwas Manral; v6ops@ops.ietf.org
Subject: Re: Flow label and its uses

I'd encourage you to look at the big-internet archives (if they
exist) from about 1993. The flow label was proposed to
support the nimrod architecture, and in essence *was* what we
later described as "MPLS", but in the IPv6 header. That's one
of the reasons that the flow label isn't covered by the IPSEC
checksum - so it could be managed appropriately at ingress
and egress to the various "flows" or "LSPs".

Yes, there has been a lot of water under that bridge. Between
requiring the flow label to pass unchanged and making the
address fixed length and of the same construction as the IPv4
address, Nimrod became very difficult to implement in IPv6,
and Noel still isn't very happy with the IPv6 community.

On Jan 17, 2006, at 3:11 PM, Bora Akyol wrote:





-----Original Message-----
From: Vishwas Manral [mailto:Vishwas@sinett.com]




And a more recent draft
http://www.faqs.org/ftp/pub/internet-drafts/draft-chakravorty-
bcc-flowla
bel-00.txt



This last one looks a lot like MPLS in IPv6 ;-)

Bora