[HECnet] Hecnet Peering

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jan 2, 2015, at 7:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2015-01-02 19:07, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote:

On Jan 2, 2015, at 12:34 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

On 2015-01-02 18:28, Hans Vlems wrote:
Is there an advantage if you use a tunnel in stead of Johnny's bridge
program    which I use?

It scales better and use less network bandwidth, if that is a concern.

Less network bandwidth because the GRE tunnel doesn   t use Ethernet padding and regular Ethernet headers, while the JB bridge is a bridge so it does have both of those?

That seems like the only difference; from the DECnet routing layer point of view, both are LAN links and the protocol operation is the same for both.

No, you're not thinking about the larger picture, Paul. :-)
Like I responded myself. One "problem" is all the routers that are broadcasting. Both hello messages and routing updates. And they need to go to all bridges connected. While if you had a tunnel between two routers, you'll end up with just the chatter between those two routers. Any routers located on each end, or elsewhere, is of no concern for the link.

But you   re comparing different cases.   GRE is like a two-station Ethernet; your bridge is more general.   The flooding case of a bridge makes a difference only if you have more than two stations.   

It seems to me that both cases produce the same number of packets if you configure a connection between just two stations, because each multicast goes to the one other station either in the GRE case or the bridge case.

	paul