Yakov, that was not nice. If you look at the "opposition" side you'll see quite a lot of people who had to run real backbones; and who have a feeling of impact featurism has on reliability of code. For what it worth, nothing makes you appreciate simplicity and quality as getting dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to fix backbone falling down in flames because of yet anothing interesting glitch caused by the flaky but feature-rich software. My position was always consistent - if you can do something (like VPN) at the edge boxes w/o inroducing complexity into core transport, this is the way to do that. "Intelligent networks" is a _bad_ idea. Also note that in the backbone world, no operator is protected from other's stupid decisions. That's why promoting good practices is a necessity, not just a religious argument. Otherwise wily Randy would heartily advise everyone else to switch to X.25 running on top of ATM :) --vadim On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Yakov Rekhter wrote:
Christian,
MPLS VPNs solve a very specific set of problems. If you don't like because it doesn't fit your operational model, don't use it. But this sort of generic bashing and FUD leads nowhere.
That would be a rational position, but it can't be accepted by the folks who have a fairly irrational attitude about the subject. These folks are of firm opinion that they know how things should be done, and moreover, their way of doing things is the one, and *only* one way of doing this.
In the absence of any rational arguments (like the case we have at hand), the only thing these folks could use to justify their dogmas is generic bashing and FUD.
Yakov.