[Babel-users] quagga-babel and blackholes

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

> 1) This was mostly just a note as to the difference in behavior
>
> 2) Unreach, as it give instant feedback, and is the same as the original
> behavior, is preferable to me. It might not be to others.

Yes, but Babel's hold time is a transient situation -- it's just a loop
avoidance mechanism that disappears after a few dozen seconds.  So it
might be better not to send any ICMP unreach messages, but instead let
the sender retry.

It probably doesn't matter much.

> Sorry, I did not capture the quagga show babel database as I assumed this
> is a reflection of the same problem you refer to, only on a larger scale.

The symptom you should be seeing is that Babel's RIB is correct (show
babel database), but that some IPv4 routes appear in Zebra's FIB as
"inactive" (show ip route).  There is no issue with IPv6, which Quagga
handles reasonably.

(Interestingly enough, comments in Quagga's source code indicate that
the authors consider IPv4 as sane, not IPv6.  We'll see how it goes when
I go around to submitting patches to make IPv4 sane, according to my
definition of sane.)

> 1) The ietf homenet working group wants to specify some variant of ospf as
> 'the' routing protocol for home networks.
>
> My own preference is for a bakeoff of some sort, where 'running code'
> trumps 'rough consensus'.

My personal worry is that Homenet are making some assumptions that
I don't feel are correct in the longer term.  They're assuming that
a home network will be wired and tree-shaped.  While it's true that's
the way homes are wired nowadays (central distribution point near the
ADSL modem), I'm of the persuasion that home networks will be more
mesh-like in the future.

> I'm hoping you're doing that from the comfort of a cafe under
> a rainless sky.

Careful there.  Writing in cafés leads to alcohol problems ;-)

-- Juliusz