The IESG has approved the following document: - 'IP-Only LAN Service (IPLS)' (draft-ietf-l2vpn-ipls-16.txt) as Historic RFC This document is the product of the Layer 2 Virtual Private Networks Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Adrian Farrel and Alia Atlas. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-l2vpn-ipls/ Technical Summary: A Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) is used to interconnect systems across a wide-area or metropolitan-area network, making it appear that they are on a private LAN. The systems which are interconnected may themselves be LAN switches. If, however, they are IP hosts or IP routers, certain simplifications to the operation of the VPLS are possible. We call this simplified type of VPLS an "IP-only LAN Service" (IPLS). In an IPLS, as in a VPLS, LAN interfaces are run in promiscuous mode, and frames are forwarded based on their destination MAC addresses. However, the maintenance of the MAC forwarding tables is done via signaling, rather than via the MAC address learning procedures specified in [IEEE 802.1D]. This draft specifies the protocol extensions and procedures for support of the IPLS service. The original intent was to provide an alternate solution to VPLS for those PE routers that were not capable of learning MAC address through data plane. This became a non-issue with newer hardware. The concepts put forth by this draft are still valuable and are adopted in one form or other by newer work such as Ethernet VPN in L2VPN Working Group and possible data center applications. At this point, no further action is planned to update this document and is published simply as a historic record of the ideas. Working Group Summary: This document is an L2VPN Working Group document, and has been reviewed in the working group through multiple iterations of the draft. It was considered to be an informational draft, with the last few iterations of the draft now cleaning up references. There was considerable debate during and after the WG last call which resulted in new revisions being issued to resolve various comments. After discussion with the serving AD, the document was changed to be Historic. Thus it presents a record of the working group discussions. The revised I-D was also shown to the WG to check for any concerns. Document Quality: The document provides a clear and concise set of requirements for IPLS - broken down into different requirement areas. As a requirements draft there is no protocol implement. Personnel: Document Shepherd: Andrew McLachlan (amclachl@cisco.com) Area Director: Adrian Farrel (adrian@olddog.co.uk)
