Radia tears it up

The networking monster, Radia Perlman, has been busy doing something I've only ever dreamed of doing: unborking layer-2 and layer-3 in every way imaginable. Her 2008 Google TechTalk is mind-blowing. Numbering interfaces is supposed to be automatic? Layer-2 gets put back in its neighbor-to-neighbor-only box? Layer-3 does its job and actually handles forwarding across not only WANs, but LANs as well? *HEAD 'ASPLODE*

The IETF working group for the project is called TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). And if it survives its upcoming July review, we may have to completely redefine everything we know about technologies like Ethernet, IP, OSPF, and MPLS. Talk about a paradigm shift--as if migrating our brains to IPv6 weren't enough!

You can have a look at the IETF TRILL working group charter here.