[c-nsp] what the heck is "ip forward-protocol nd" good for

[Saku Ytti]

On 6 April 2016 at 19:16, Sebastian Beutel
<sebastian.beutel at rus.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:

Hey,

>     So i asked wisdom of the search engines and found out, that there once
> was a protocol with the name "sun-nd" and the ip protocol number 77, used in
> suns diskless sun 2 stations. The line "ip forward-protocol nd" seems to be
> the equivalent for sun-nd what ip-helper is for dhcp. Could this be? A
> workaround for a 30 year old proprietary legacy protocol is in the default
> configuration of a modern router? This is what i found:

Helper is for any number of protocols iterated by 'ip
forward-protocol'. Usually as you say DHCP (BOOTP).

Cisco (and other vendors) are in difficult position when it comes to
default settings. You ship with some config, and no matter how crazy
they are, changing them will break something from someone.

I think one solution to this would be to support multiple
standard/default settings, and your config would have line about which
standard you are using. If there is nothing, it's using the latest
available in that image. This way people could choose when they adopt
more modern standards and as vendors and customers learn how things
should be configured, it would be lower barrier to introduce new
standard.
Basically this standard release would be just be config over which
user config is merged on, likely very simple concept for ios-xr,
junos, but perhaps not so simple for classic ios.
-- 
  ++ytti