At 2:08 PM 8/11/95, Paul A Vixie wrote:

I clearly think that colocated workstations are better than route processors inside the routers themselves. I'm less certain that they are better than route servers and a unified/recursive/realtime RADB. I'm not sure at all that any interconnect can, should, or ever shall require this kind of dual- routing setup for its members. In other words, why are we discussing this?

I like the idea of workstation-based route processors over forwarding/routing engines because it decouples the complex route processing s/w environment from the forwarding function. The economics of complex route processing don't match the economics of big honking routers and workstations are a better development environment. The reason to talk about it here is that if we are to move forward in this direction we need a simple exchange protocol between route server and forwarding engine to make this happen. --Kent