Re: what new protocols?
"There is a bunch of fancy shit out there I know that has never had any value to me(e.g. TRILL -- but that is a layer 2 thing totally independent of course of layer 3 IP)."
You haven't been paying attention:
https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/90/slides/slides-90-trill-2.pdf
TRILL keeps being pushed as a data centre protocol, but the reality is that it's better used as a large campus WAN/MAN one - the reason Radia Perlman created it was spanning-tree storms that took out a hospital network, caused by continued joining up of previously-isolated switch networks until the entire ediface fell over horribly.
TRILL distributed L3 gateways take away the SPOF of routers and the extreme traffic loads which can occur on router links. It's better than the Anycast L3 gateway proposal which proceeded it.
Yes, it works on IPv6 as well as IPv4
The vast majority of readers might THINK they have no use for TRILL, but as soon as you have more than a couple of switches interconnected and/or start having to use LACP, it has advantages.
Spanning Tree should never be used for networks more than 4 switches wide - the wastefulness of having redundant links sitting idle is one factor as is the convergence time and the fact that ANY LACP link change (even to clients) will result in a spanning-tree reconvergence event. When I'm running multiple 10GB/s links around it's not sensible to waste their capacity by having one or more sitting idle when another may be maxxed out - this happens with both spanning tree and LACP.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
