Subject: [Dime] Reference on routing problem

From: Tom Taylor <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:32:52 -0500

Bernard Aboba suggested in the meeting we check out an RFC relating to the 
much-discussed second-pass stateful proxy routing problem. I believe my meeting 
notes caught the wrong number. Bernard, could you give that reference again?

It seems to me one way of looking at the problem is that the session is being 
processed by a chain of stateful servers. The problem is to ensure that all 
messages of the session pass through the same set of stateful servers. The 
reason I started to think about things in this fashion is because Glen was 
concerned that if one of the stateful proxies goes down, a lot of sessions go 
down with it. Wouldn't that also happen with server failure? If not, wouldn't 
the same techniques work to cope with failure of a stateful proxy?

Tom
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From: "Glen Zorn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:58:59 -0800

Tom Taylor [mailto://[email-masked]] writes:

> down with it. 

AFAICT, that problem is endemic to strict source routing in general: it
makes the network extremely brittle in the face of even minor network
problems.  It doesn't really matter if it is enforced by stateful boxes in
the path, a special AVP or whatever.  As I've mentioned before, that's not
my problem: if somebody wants to design a network that way, it's their
problem.  I prefer the stateful proxy method of providing this
"functionality" (if necessary) because it requires no changes to the
Diameter protocol. Basically, I'm opposed to breaking Diameter (more ;-) in
order to help people who've designed broken networks. 

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