On Thu, 30 Jul 2026 at 09:46, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
The point I was trying to make is that just because a routing protocol supports doing that doesn't mean it's a good idea operationally. There are other issues that come into network design that often suggest a single flat IGP might not give you enough knobs to allow you to control traffic flows and impact radius from unusual externalities.
It was a long-winded and meandering way of saying "just because you CAN, doesn't necessarily mean you SHOULD." ^_^;
I'll see your long-winded and meandering and raise you this: Of course I agree with the general principle here, but in this case, just because you can, you should. Because NOT doing flat IGP is far more complex, and adding complexity requires justification. And as we know, all of these devices are extremely fragile and very low quality software, we run into customer-affecting bugs all the time and it's entirely impossible to have any strong confidence that what you're delivering works well. So you really need to pick your battles, which problems most. benefit from careful thought, which problems do not need it. I'm fairly confident (happy to be proven wrong, if provided access) that in any network configuration I review, I'll find catastrophic mistakes in production configuration, in control-plane protection, in QoS, and highly suboptimal configurations in regards to convergence and redundancy. And these will not be complex or esoteric, but fairly common, simple mistakes. No one seems to have time to even get basics rights, doing deep dive on issue that is known to be very barren ground for issues is not justifiable. -- ++ytti