6bone maps

[Frank Strauss]

Hi!

>> What do you think about using a more sophisticated tool for drawing
>> these 6bone maps. One tool I think of (why ever ;-) is tkined
>> (http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/ibr/projects/nm/tkined/welcome.html). It may
>> be used to draw maps with some more information than just the
>> interconnection of IPv6 islands, e.g. those islands may get expanded,
>> to get more information on their internal structures and addresses.
>> Of course, simple postscript maps may be extracted.
>> 
>> One major problem would be, to keep the information up to date. ;-/
>> 
>> To get an impression (not more), you might take a look at a few
>> links at the bottom of http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/~strauss/ipng/.


Bob> Thanks for bringing this up. I really believe that, in the long
Bob> run, it would be best to auto generate the maps.  As you point
Bob> out, we would need to have an up to date registry, which
Bob> hopefully is what Geert Jan's efforts are all about.

Hm. I think this is worth a separate thesis. ;-) (extraction of
locations from DNS, managing databases of addresses, arranging `good
looking' graphs, ...)


Bob> =46or me, unfortunately, this form of drawing is not directly
Bob> viewable on my Mac as I could not find a tkined viewer.  Also, I
Bob> still must print .ps files to look at them.  Unix users may not
Bob> have these problems of course.  Can it be taught to generate .gif
Bob> files?  I'm pretty clueless about tkined :-(

I converted those two maps to gif and put links on my page. BTW,
probably, tkined may compile cleanly on your Mac. Juergen? ;-)


Bob> I say we do both manual and auto maps for awhile, till it is
Bob> clear that the registry gives sufficient data for the map to be
Bob> up-to-date, and that we like the auto gen'd result.

Real automated map generation is quite difficult, I think. It would
take much time to define all needed attributes and write some code.
Once, reaching the point of acceptable operation, the 6bone might be
that large, that it doesn't fit on one page. ;-)


Bob> Would you be willing to set up a process (code!) to generate a
Bob> map from Geert Jan's registry?  It would probably have the effect
Bob> of forcing people to register :-)

Nice aspect. ;-) But I don't want to put much work on arranging those
maps. For me, using tkined is just a very nice way to combine the
creation of map overviews and some kind of network management.

Probably we could put another field into the registry records, that
contains a tkined map URL. Such a map may contain pointers to
neighboring tkined maps. This would be a good way to decentralize the
map management, although it doesn't give an overview at once.

							Frank