Dan Gunter wrote:
Dan, It is not a caching issue. It is that ifName & IP Address are not sufficent to uniquely identify an interface in all cases.
OK, clearly I didn't understand this whole issue, sorry. What you're saying is that you need N additional identifiers in addition to IP and interface. So: is N=1 sufficiently general? Or should the model allow N=2+ as well? (IP=x,IF=y,chassis=z,...)
I can't think of any case where (IP,ifName,Chassis) does not uniquely identify an interface. However to be general, it probably makes sense to allow this to be extended. Thanks Joe
-Dan
IP addresses are not guaranteed to be unique. Interface names are not unique. For example, we have plans to deploy around 4 different DNS servers using anycast. All will have the same IP address. All the different router interfaces connected to the different servers will have the same IP address. It is possible that they could all be on ge-1/0/0. The name of the router or chassis is required to distinguish between the connection to a DNS server in California vs one in New York.
I think this concept is generally applicable. Especially if you consider deployment in networks that use nat or private address space where you could have lots of collisions, not just a couple per network.
--Joe