Talk:Forwarding Information Base

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[edit] Forwarding and Routing Tables are not the same Thing

I'd recommend merging this not into routing table, but into Forwarding Plane. Indeed, while both routing table and forwarding tables should have cross-reference entries, I'd also recommend routing tables be merged into control plane. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:21, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

This article and Routing table should both be merged into Router. Too many little articles all over the place splits up the concepts. This is an encyclopedia, not a dictionary! --Nethgirb 09:21, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
I have several concerns with merging. First, the "little" articles will not be so little once they are filled out. We don't, for example, merge BGP and OSPF and RIP and ISIS and PIM because they are all routing protocols. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:16, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
These articles are a problem. Wiki is NOT a search engine. It is an encyclopdia. The little articles are NOT encyclopedic. and should be deleted. For example, If Forwarding Plane is a Cisco term, it is considered a spam article since it is about a vendor term.
It is absolutely not a Cisco term. See the IETF Forwarding and Control Element Separation working group at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/forces-charter.html. These terms are also used in telephony and the IP convergence group, http://imsforum.org/. Optical networking groups, including the Metro Ethernet Forum http://www.metroethernetforum.org/, use the concepts.
Am I incorrect to suggest that the forwarding and control separation is used in many places besides layer 3 routing, and perhaps itself qualifies as encyclopedic? I'd hesitate, for example, to say "routing table" necessarily has an IP next hop address, when in optical routing, it would have a physical interface and wavelength as the next hop. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:24, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
Wiki is not a manual for Routers or their components. This is why I tried to explain on the talk page what goes where in these three articles that are already encyclopic. Wiki frowns on stub articles. The only way I personally can see Routing table existing as its own article is if Forward Plan and control plane are merged. I am quite kind and an inclusionist but I cannot let Wiki edits go out of control.
If anything is to be merged, it would be routing table into control plane, and forwarding information base into forwarding plane. Perhaps I don't understand your suggestion, but it sounds as if you are merging broader concepts (such as control) into subordinate pieces (such as routing table). There are things that aren't routing tables that logically come under control plane, but not the other way around. After sixteen years or so of teaching these concepts, I find one of the major problems is that people fixate on individual components and thus fail to understand the overall problem being solved. Howard C. Berkowitz 21:16, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
To create an article you have to think, would this be in an encylopidia? Rememeber, wiki is not a user manual. For example if you were writing about a piece of software, you are not allowed to explain how it works as you would in a manual. This is an encyclopedia. Now the reason why you can get away with this in Router is because the artilce was tagged for more information. But these other articles are not. I have a problem with them all actually existing. I am part of the cleanup task force for networking so I need to watch over this.
So I ask you, is Forward Plane encyclopedic? control plan, etc. Your comments. --akc9000 (talk • contribs • count) 10:58, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
Yes, forwarding plane and control plane are encyclopedic. They are not just used in IP and other layer 3 routing. A layer 2 bridge has distinct forwarding and control planes. Media gateways have distinct forwarding and control planes, which is strongly emphasized in the IMS architecture for them. Pure optical routers have forwarding and control. I can't think of a way to draw this, but I could easily picture a standard article structure for the broad class of network relaying elements: content (L7) switches, load balancers (L4), IP routers (L3), MPLS routers ("layer 2.5". Ugh), bridges (L2), layer 2 switches (bridge + refinements such as microsegmentation), optical routers and programmable time-division multiplexers and cross-connects (L1). Howard C. Berkowitz 21:16, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
Update to my comment—I took a further look at the contents of the various articles and have somewhat revised my opinion. I'm moving my comments over to Talk:Router, though, since this involves the structure of a number of different articles, and Router seems like a fairly "central" article. --Nethgirb 12:28, 3 July 2007 (UTC)