Re: Should we share?

[mikebw@bilow.bilow.uu.ids.net (Mike Bilow)]

> AX.25 routing?  Gag me, Witherspoon!  It is like building large
> extended LANs.  I sort of make a living now helping clients dig 
> themselves out of that hole.

 LAM> But you can also look at the AX.25 level-2 fabric as a switching
 LAM> facility, much the same way that you use Frame Relay to carry IP and
 LAM> other protocols.  If you can, somehow, use it to connect together
 LAM> different radio subnets into one larger, logical subnetwork, then it
 LAM> could actually win.  Maybe.

That's like saying that one could, in theory, move the Atlantic Ocean to the
Pacific Ocean using succesive operations involving a teaspoon.  AX.25 has no
switching facilities in it except for really awful half-baked approximations 
such as digipeating.  There have been attempts to squish such features on top
of AX.25, most notably netrom, but running IP over netrom is much like
subjecting the teaspoon hypothesis to empirical testing.

Fred is right on this one, as he has been for years.  What we really need is a
dynamic IP routing protocol that does not assume the existence of reliably
connected subnetworks, since we don't have them.  The other major exponent of a
solution to this longstanding issue is, in my opinion, Glenn Elmore, who has
been reminding us at frequent intervals for the past several years that the
real problem with packet is lack of attention to the physical layer.

-- Mike