[ih] The story of BGP?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Louis Mamakos <louie at transsys.com>

    > EGP-2 suffering under the ever increasing size of the route announcements.

Oi, vey! Don't remind me about them!!

If you remember, the big difference between EGP-1 and EGP-2 was that in
EGP-2, the route (technically, reachability) entries were stuffed into the
packet in the most space-efficient way possible - which was an order which
was totally unrelated to the way anyone would ever store them in a routing
database!

I remember writing a bunch of code to run over the routing database and build
a tree (using nodes allocated from the heap) which was organized in a way
which was optimal for generating the bizarre format of EGP route packets. And
then when the routing table changed...

The thing about that crazy packet format was that it probably only bought us
a year or so over EGP-1 (since the EGP-2 updates were probably 50% of the
size of the EGP-1 ones). It would have been much smarter to simply go to
multi-packet updates straight off (and probably less code even, given the
amount of code it took to build the tree, etc).

	Noel