RFC 2763 (rfc2763) - Page 1 of 5

Dynamic Hostname Exchange Mechanism for IS-IS

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Network Working Group                                           N. Shen
Request for Comments: 2763                                Siara Systems
Category: Informational                                         H. Smit
                                                          Cisco Systems
                                                          February 2000


                  Dynamic Hostname Exchange Mechanism
                               for IS-IS

Status of this Memo

   This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
   not specify an Internet standard of any kind.  Distribution of this
   memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000).  All Rights Reserved.

Abstract

   Currently, there does not exist a simple and dynamic mechanism for
   routers running IS-IS to learn about symbolic hostnames. This
   document defines a new TLV which allows the IS-IS routers to flood
   their name to system ID mapping information across the IS-IS network.

1. Introduction

   IS-IS uses a 1-8 byte system ID (normally 6 bytes) to represent a
   node in the network.  For management and operation reasons, network
   operators need to check the status of IS-IS adjacencies, entries in
   the routing table and the content of the IS-IS link state database.
   It is obvious that, when looking at diagnostics information,
   hexadecimal representations of systemIDs and LSP identifiers are less
   clear than symbolic names.

   One way to overcome this problem is to define a name-to-systemID
   mapping on a router. This mapping can be used bidirectionally. E.g.,
   to find symbolic names for systemIDs, and to find systemIDs for
   symbolic names. One way to build this table of mappings is by static
   definitions. Among network administrators who use IS-IS as their IGP
   it is current practice to define such static mappings.

   Thus every router has to maintain a table with mappings between
   router names and systemIDs. These tables need to contain all names
   and systemIDs of all routers in the network.




Shen & Smit                  Informational
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