Subject: Changing the FEC for VPLS to generalized PWid FEC

From: "Vach Kompella" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2004 10:47:03 -0800

Folks,

There is still no discussion on changing the FEC type from 128, as it
stands today, to the generalized PW FEC type (129), as suggested by Eric
Rosen.  I think this is a good idea, and I know that several vendors
have implemented the old style, so it will put a crimp in your
implementations, but can we make some progress here?

The main reason for moving forward is to address future issues with
VPLSen by using a structured name and 32 bits just isn't good enough for
that.  This will assist in auto-discovery, inter-regional VPLSen, and
adequate name-space size.

-Vach

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From: Wei Luo <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2004 13:19:28 -0800

Vach,

I support this move and we also need to factor in two things:

1. The VPLS draft should to be defined as signaling protocol or transport 
agnostic as it states in Section 5 so that either LDP or L2TP can be used to set 
up VPLS connectivity.  It's fine to use the terms like AGI, AII, SAI, TAI and 
alike.  Both LDP and L2TP have the similar protocol extensions and terminology 
defined as in:

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-pwe3-control-protocol-05.txt

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-l2tpext-l2vpn-00.txt

But protocol-specific text should be avoided in the VPLS draft.

2. Backwards compatibilty with FEC 128.  But this is largely an action item for
the PWE3 control draft (draft-ietf-pwe3-control-protocol-05.txt).  I had 
proposed some text to the authors on solving the backward compatible issue. 
Maybe we could revive that discussion on a separate thread.

---Wei