Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!mit-eddie!bu-cs!kwe From: kwe@bu-cs.BU.EDU (kwe@bu-it.bu.edu (Kent W. England)) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.lans Subject: Re: What about "brouters"? Message-ID: <25287@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 9 Oct 88 23:43:25 GMT References: <281@fed.FRB.GOV> <25255@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <2944@uoregon.uoregon.edu> Reply-To: kwe@buit13.bu.edu (Kent England) Followup-To: comp.dcom.lans Organization: Boston Univ. Information Tech. Dept. Lines: 38 In article <2944@uoregon.uoregon.edu> jqj@drizzle.UUCP (JQ Johnson) writes: > Though I agree >that the HyBridge is a very nice product (I have one on order), I'm not >sure you should call it a "brouter". RAD and others have been using >the "brouter" term for some time now for a different beast -- > [...] >The RAD product's intelligence is, as I recall, limited to traditional >packet filtering, creation and regeneration of a spanning tree, and >load sharing among multiple MAC-layer paths. The load sharing aspect is the only thing beyond the definition of a IEEE-compliant bridge in the RAD product, so I'm not convinced they deserve the exclusive right to define the generic term "brouter". But one of the things I want to resolve with this audience is what we mean by "brouter". I think brouter means "a box that combines the functionality of a router and a bridge". It also implies that the bridge functionality might be expanded or enhanced by the routing capabilities of this box. It may be a little premature for me to be testing these waters, but I am curious about the direction of the technology and what I will be able to do with a generic "brouter". I am particularly interested in how a vendor like cisco will make multiport brouters work. Will they simply fit them into the IEEE spanning tree model or will we (should we) be able to make them a little smarter, ala the RAD approach for load sharing. I, for one, want to be able to limit the subnets (physical nets) that participate in the bridge protocol. For example, I want to be able to configure bridging of a set of Ethernet types between a limited subset of Ethernets among my twenty or so total. I would not be happy with a brouter that simply has an ON/OFF switch for bridging. I want to be able to apply some limited a priori routing intelligence to the bridging function and I would like to find ways to limit the broadcast scaling problem, if possible, by using the intelligence in a brouter. I want to explore the possibilities opened up by this new breed of hardware/software. Perhaps I should just wait until I get my Hybridge and read the manual and see how far cisco has gotten with this.