Re: 1 week until Summer of Code application time

[Erik Wikström <Erik-wikstrom@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2009-03-05 07:36, Archimedes Gaviola wrote:
> Hi Justin,
> 
> Just want to suggest and share this idea (without mentoring) about
> virtual routing based on this link here
> http://www.ipinfusion.com/pdf/VirtualRouting_app-note_3rev0302.pdf.
> Although I'm not so sure if this is already implemented in the
> project, so just correct me if I'm wrong. Basically, virtual routing
> is a concept of emulating multiple instances of routing tables (RIB
> and FIB) intended for running multi-independent network services.

On the product I'm working on we have something similar (I have not
studied the paper you provided in detail so I can't be sure it's the
same thing) called a Routing Instance. Each routing instance is
connected to an interface, but these interfaces are usually not actual
physical interfaces rather they are usually VLAN interfaces. To be
really useful you need some way to specify which to use which would
probably mean to add some parameters when creating a socket to specify
which routing instance to use.

I don't want to sound negative (because I think it's a cool feature and
a worthy challenge) but I don't see much use for it in DragonFly BSD.
For a product such as the one I'm working on where we provide network
connectivity for mobile devices where packets are to be routed to
different corporate networks depending on the subscription (or some
other criteria) it makes sense. We just create one VLAN for each network
and all their packets use the associated routing instance. But I don't
quite see the usefulness in the kinds of roles that (I imagine) people
uses DragonFly BSD for. Perhaps OpenBSD would be more interested, they
strike me as having more focus on being usable as an internal node in a
network.

-- 
Erik Wikström