CURRENT MEETING REPORT

Reported by Robert Coltun, FORE Systems

Minutes of the Open Shortest Path First IGP Working Group (ospf)

The OSPF Working Group met on Monday March 4th, and discussed the Opaque LSA, Cut-Through Advertisements and OSPF Version 3 For IP Version 6.

Rob Coltun presented the following two proposals.

• Opaque LSA

The updates to the current draft were given which included:

• removing the interface address from the link-local Opaque type given the comments from the last meeting this can be derived from the receiving interface. This change also removes the restriction of the link-local LSA only being useful on multi-access networks.
• the Opaque LSA scoping values were made equivalent to those of the OSPF version 3.

• Cut-Thru Advertisements

A brief overview was given of the Cut-Thru Advertisement draft (which is soon to be released).

No adverse reactions to the above two proposals.

Rob and Dennis then presented the OSPF version 3 draft.

In reviewing the minutes taken by Howard Berkowitz (thanks much) it became clear that the presentation followed the overview given in the draft and is therefore not included here in detail.

Besides for the issues of cleaning up and finishing the draft the only issue was to put the tag back into the AS external LSA which is handy for policy filtering. The view of the room was that the protocol was very well designed and that the implementation of version 3 from version 2 would probably be smooth.

After the meeting a few vendors said that they would start implementations fairly soon and were interested in feeding comments into the draft in the short term.

Two important issues were brought up after the meeting which were:

1. How would customers transition from OSPF v2 to OSPF v3?
2. With OSPF v3, small routers carefully size their OSPF memory utilization based on the known number of LSAs and the topology size. What are the issues for small routers now that LSAs can be introduced with a flood/don't flood if unknown bit, which is controlled by the sender.