On Tuesday, April 16, 2002, at 01:23 , Randy Bush wrote: > puhleeze! is-is worked at scale. ospf did not. heck, when most > large isps were starting (late '80s and early '90s), ospf barely > worked at all. Randy, Your statement is true for at least one vendor's OSPF, but clearly not true for several other vendors' OSPF (e.g. John Moy's). The well-known OSPF issues with the one vendor were with the original coder (name omitted) of their OSPF, not with the OSPF spec. That vendor's implementation also got a fair bit better over time. I got to learn the history (and their motivation) while working at that vendor as a coder. I also worked in network engineering for a very large (multi-continent) ISP that ran OSPF, not IS-IS. It worked fine. I know of other similarly large ISPs that work fine on OSPF. Claims that OSPF doesn't scale are provably false by several existence proofs. > and perhaps one should not accuse a company of a "proprietary" > advantage for implementing a well-known standardized protocol. IS-IS as deployed in the global Internet is not quite what is in the ISO standards nor RFC-1195, sad to say. Over time, the de facto IS-IS specs might get more fully published -- certainly they are more published now than several years ago. But even today, there is a bunch of stuff that's widely deployed yet not in any ISO spec or any RFC. This contrasts rather sharply with the state of OSPF documentation and standardisation. Note that none of your pushback contradicted my main claim, which is that IS-IS is not an *IETF* standard of any sort. Examination of any accurate rfc-index.txt will confirm this. Ran rja@extremenetworks.com