RFC 2763 (rfc2763) - Page 1 of 5
Dynamic Hostname Exchange Mechanism for IS-IS
Alternative Format: Original Text Document
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