Subject: Non-member submission from ["Baldwin, Dave" <Dave.Baldwin@emulex .com>] RE: Last Call: IP and ARP over Fibre Channel to Proposed Standar d

From: Rajeev Atluri <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:30:11 -0800

From: "Baldwin, Dave" <[email-masked]>
To: "'Raj Bhagwat'" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "[email-masked]'" <[email-masked]>,
        "[email-masked]'" <[email-masked]>
Subject: RE: Last Call: IP and ARP over Fibre Channel to Proposed Standard
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 10:14:32 -0800
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id KAA08199

Raj,

You state "This mechanism would accommodate stations that don't support Open
Replicates.". I strongly object to this statement. All FC-AL devices are
required to support Open Replicate to the extent that they pass the frame on
to the next device. If you are suggesting that a device can comply with the
IPFC standard without properly responding to a FARP-REQ (MATCH_WW_PN), this
will lead to serious interoperability problems.

I don't have any problem with allowing Inverse ARP in the IPFC standard as
an optional behavior, as long as all compliant devices are required to
handle the FARP-REQ mechanism.

Best regards,
Dave Baldwin
Emulex Network Systems

----------
From: 	Raj Bhagwat
Sent: 	Monday, November 23, 1998 3:07 PM
To: 	[email-masked]'
Cc: 	[email-masked]'
Subject: 	RE: Last Call: IP and ARP over Fibre Channel to Proposed
Standard

I would like to submit a request to include Inverse ARP capability to the
IPFC draft. I think it will be very useful in certain environments as
described below.

In a private loop environment devices typically do extensive polling to
discover other devices. As part of the discovery, they PLOGI into each
device and find out the World Wide Port Name & Port Id among other things
for each device. However, as part of the discovery, it is not possible to
learn the IP address of the device. If we could do this somehow, then the
device can build a table for IP_Addr to WWPN mapping and use it later
without resorting to sending ARP request through Open Replicate.

Inverse ARP is extensively used in WANs, especially Frame Relay. It is easy
to implement. The frame format is exactly similar to ARP Request/Reply. Only
the opcodes are different. The requesting station fills the hardware address
field with the WWPN of the target device and leaves the protocol address
field as zero. The request is sent to a specific station that has the
matching WWPN. The receiving station will fill in its IP address in the
target protocol address field and send the response back.

This mechanism would accommodate stations that don't support Open
Replicates.

Raj Bhagwat
Gadzoox Networks

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From:	The IESG [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> <mailto:[mailto:[email-masked]]>
> Sent:	Tuesday, November 17, 1998 10:31 AM
> Cc:	[email-masked]
> Subject:	Last Call: IP and ARP over Fibre Channel to 
> Proposed Standard
> 
> 
> The IESG has received a request from the IP Over Fibre Channel Working
> Group to consider IP and ARP over Fibre Channel
> <draft-ietf-ipfc-fibre-channel-03.txt> as a Proposed Standard.
> 
> The IESG plans to make a decision in the next few weeks, and solicits
> final comments on this action.  Please send any comments to the
> [email-masked] or [email-masked] mailing lists by December 1, 1998.
> 
> Files can be obtained via
> ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipfc-fibre-chann
> el-03.txt
>