Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!psuvm!DHDIBM1!PASCH From: PASCH@DHDIBM1.BITNET (Berthold Pasch +49 (6221) 404-242) Newsgroups: bit.listserv.nodmgt-l Subject: :routtab tableformat for NJEF Message-ID: Date: 7 Feb 90 13:57:49 GMT Sender: Node Management Discussion Reply-To: Node Management Discussion Lines: 35 Approved: NETNEWS@PSUVM Gateway The following is the result of a discussion between Ed Skochinski and me. What we are now looking for are additional suggestions, considerations or objections (if there are reasons why it should not work). GR (genrouts) will support the NJEF routing table format. However, the tables for NJEF require additional information which is not (yet) provided in the nodes file (neither new nor old format). The missing information is the 3-character local link-id ("lid") to which NJEF will associate the linkname (adjacent nodename). This "lid" MUST appear in the NJEF routing tables. In order to avoid that NJEF node administrators have to edit the table manually for inserting the proper "lid"s in more than 3000 route statements, the correct "lid"s should be generated by GR (genrouts). Thus GR has to know which linkname is associated with which "lid". The most logical place to specify such a link-attribute would be the linkdefinitions in the :linksNN tags. However, I'm reluctant to extend the linkdefinition to include such local information. The next logical place would be the :routtab tag since the "lid"s are only used for generating the routing table and the tableformat in the :routtab tag contains local information anyway. The tableformat for NJEF could then be: NJEF linkname1=lid1 < linkname2=lid2 ... > Since at present the maximum number of linkname=lid associations used by any NJEF node is four, and it is unlikely to ever grow beyond ten, I think this is a practical solution. The total length of such a :routtab tag would still fit into the maximum length allowed for tags (max is 255). If there are no objections or better proposals, then I'll specify the NJEF tableformat in :routtab as shown above. Regards, Berthold Pasch