[e2e] on local ethernet throughput?

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>

> The issue as I understand it was that the only termination equipment 
> available for companies to terminate DSL at the CO was the so-called DSLAM 
> (invented for ATM circuit switching).  And the customer side equipment was 
> Ethernet on one side and ATM over DSL on the other.
>
> PPPoE only capped the kludgery involved.
>
> If equipment companies could have ignored the ATM madness of bell-shaped 
> companies (carrier class equals ATM...), then we would have had packets 
> over DSL, and an Ethernet or IP-based authentication (like 802.1x).

> At 01:23 PM 10/24/2001 -0700, Andrew Smith wrote:
> >There are plenty of other possibilities that involve "user" authentication
> >in the control plane that don't need to touch the data plane packet
> >encapsulation. One example is what we did for IEEE 802.1X - an on/off switch
> ...

What does IEEE 802.anything have to do with the problem?
Why re-invent the wheel?

What's wrong with the old and well established PPP authentication
mechanisms?  How do the authentication needs of DSL differ from
modems, cable modems, or any other point-to-point link?

There some things wrong with LCP and the AUTH state machines, but
somehow everyone else has managed to make them work.  DSL "modems"
didn't need to add Ethernet headers to the kludgery to make PPP work.

> >I put "user" in quotes above because I think that what the DSL deployers
> >wanted was "payer authentication", not necessarily "user" (I have to give my
> >"user" password to anyone in my household for them to use the DSL link with
> >a PPPoE session and my provider makes me use that same password to use their
> >email services :-( (hence the new email address!).

That sort of brain fart happens elsewhere.  It's long been especially
common with Microsoft PPP software, but a Microsoft PPP "expert" or
two to the contrary, it was never required by PPP, as demonstrated by
PPP implementations before and after Microsoft's.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at rhyolite.com