[c-nsp] IPv6 BGP on IOS-XR

[Mark Tinka]

On Friday, July 29, 2011 03:57:59 AM Nick Hilliard wrote:

> I am a total fan of XR's RPL.  It makes regular IOS
> route-maps look lame-ass in comparison.

Well, not always.

There were a lot of things in IOS that just worked and made 
sense, but were removed from RPL because Cisco "thought it 
would be better for the customer".

Well, after a long-week discussion with my SE (mostly me 
barking at him), and a parallel session between him and the 
RPL/IOS XR team back at Tasmania (mostly barking at each 
other), we setup a call with all of us in it so I can bark 
at all of them :-).

In the end, they did realize that some of the decisions that 
RPL has taken (when compared to IOS, or even Junos) just 
don't make sense in service provider environments. Is RPL 
much more flexible than IOS route maps, hell yeah - but 
they've also broken some of the simple things that make 
route maps (and policies in Junos) very intuitive and simple 
to use.

So some changes were promised by the DE's, and yes, a number 
of enhancements have made or it (or will make it) into 
current and future code.

I'm not sure going into those features on-list is 
appropriate (as these calls are always NDA), but we can 
exchange some ideas off-list, Nick :-).

	Background: We're not new to IOS XR, but that has
	 	    been in a core deployment where the most
	   	    interesting thing going on is BGP for
	            IPv6 with 'allow-all' policies. When we
	  	    started deploying ASR9010's for our PE
		    Aggregation, the issues with RPL began
	  	    to truly come out :-). After all is said
		    & done, however, IOS XR is a decent
		    piece of code, and the DE's are willing	
	  	    to improve RPL, so it's not all bad -
		    they just need to remember that some
		    folk are coming from an IOS and Junos
		    background, and that what may make sense
		    to a DE may not be the case for a real
		    ISP in the wild.

Cheers,

Mark.
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