Re: Supporting 4 way connections in LKSCTP

On 12/04/2013 12:57 PM, Sun Paul wrote:

As I know, the A to C and A to D case must have a router in between to form
SCTP multihome topology.

Not necessary.  I've produced proper multihoming topologies with just
VLANs and different subnet assignment.  You can even remove VLANs
if you correctly set your arp_ignore and arp_announce values.

-vlad

On Dec 4, 2013 10:51 PM, "David Laight" [off-list ref] wrote:

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In normal operation, IP-A sends INIT to IP-X, IP-X returns INIT_ACK to
IP-A. IP-A then sends HB to IP-X, IP-X then returns HB_ACK to IP-A. In
the meantime, IP-B sends HB to IP-Y and IPY returns HB_ACK.

In case of the path between IP-A and IP-X is broken, IP-B sends INIT
to IP-X, NODE-B uses IP-Y to return INIT_ACK to IP-B. Then IP-B sends
HB to IP-X, and IP-Y returns HB_ACK to IP-B. In the meantime, the HB
communication between IP-B and IP-Y follows the normal flow.

Can I confirm, is it really valid?

As long as NODE-B knows about both IP-A and IP-B, and NODE-A knows about
both IP-X and IP-Y (meaning all the addresses were exchanged inside INIT
and INIT-ACK), then this situation is perfectly valid.  In fact, this
has been tested an multiple interops.

There are some network configurations that do cause problems.
Consider 4 systems with 3 LAN segments:
A) 10.10.10.1 on LAN X and 192.168.1.1 on LAN Y.
B) 10.10.10.2 on LAN X and 192.168.1.2 on LAN Y.
C) 10.10.10.3 on LAN X.
D) 10.10.10.4 on LAN X and 192.168.1.2 on LAN Z.
There are no routers between the networks (and none of the systems
are running IP forwarding).

If A connects to B everything is fine - traffic can use either LAN.

Connections from A to C are problematic if C tries to send anything
(except a HB) to 192.168.1.1 before receiving a HB response.
One of the SCTP stacks we've used did send messages to an
inappropriate address, but I've forgotten which one.

Connections between A and D fail unless the HB errors A receives
for 192.168.1.2 are ignored.

Of course the application could explicitly bind to only the 10.x address
but that requires the application know the exact network topology
and may be difficult for incoming calls.

        David