First, I would recommend checking out Cisco's MPLS FAQ For Beginners, or the NANOG Presentation "MPLS for Dummies" by Richard A Steenbergen. They both have some really good information.
With that said, let me address your questions one at a time. (I have excerpted them in part below.)
1: After the initial convergence of the network, LSPs now exist between all FECs which are typically interfaces on LERs that connect to a subnet.
Yes, LSP's exist towards all reachable FECs. And an MPLS packet could now be switched across the network.
2: Assuming that baseline is correct; How does R1 know it is an LER for an LSP that spans to R6 for example
R1 has no clue that it is part of an LSP that spans to R6. It only cares about the local/connected labels and FECs. That is part of what makes MPLS Label Switching fast and effective. It doesn't have to know the whole path. The router just knows that to reach FEC1, I apply label 1234, and exit interface XYZ.
Then later hops in the path utilize the same process, swapping in the appropriate next hop label and switching the packet on.
As for the bottom line question How are the LERs determined?, a router itself doesn't really know or care if it's an LER. It just knows that when it receives a packet destined for a local destination, with no tag, it delivers it.
In your output above, you can see that the first 4 outgoing FECs have Pop tag listed as the Outgoing Tag. A packet leaving R1 for one of the local subnets on R2 or R3 simply has it's tag popped and forwarded out the appropriate interface.
When R2 or R3 receive that packet, they see no label and process it via the normal routing process which delivers it to a local interface.
To quote the Wikipedia article on MPLS:
At the egress router, when the last label has been popped, only the payload remains. This can be an IP packet, or any of a number of other kinds of payload packet. The egress router must therefore have routing information for the packet's payload, since it must forward it without the help of label lookup tables. An MPLS transit router has no such requirement.
Best Answer
EDIT: Just checked the literature - doesn't look like static LSP's are supported on MLX/XMR/CES/CER IronWare at least as of 5.2.0. :-/ My Brocade account rep also confirmed that LSP's signaled with RSVP or LDP are the only options and they have no plans to add support back in for static LSP's.
Aside from the above, what you can do with RSVP is define a manual ERO for the signaled LSP to traverse, with a combination of
strictorlooseattributes.Example:
strictmeans that traversal of that hop is mandatory.loosemeans that you let CSPF/MPLS TED (populated by OSPF or ISIS) handle how to get to the destination.And then when you create your LSP, you can tell it to use that specific path as primary/standby etc, ie:
I know this doesn't fit your requirement of not using a signaling protocol, but to be honest I'm not sure if any requirement of not using one really makes much sense. Maybe you could elaborate on why you don't want to use RSVP/LDP for signalling?