Follow up to previous post regarding SAAVIS

Thu Aug 13 00:43:00 UTC 2009

On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> I would make the opposite argument, my business would NEVER go to any
> network which didn't support IRR (and a bunch of other simple but
> important things, like a full set of non-secret BGP communities). It's
> amazing the number of networks that excludes in this day and age. And
> not even because "omg IRR is good because someone told me so and we
> should support it", but because I've seen FAR too much grief caused by
> humans typoing prefix-lists, or taking days to process them. It is the
> height of absurdity that this would ever be considered an acceptable
> solution to the problem.

I'd be very hesitant to use an upstream that didn't use any filtering 
method.  But, as convenient as I find the IRR system to be (from the 
customer perspective, at least), I'm quite happy that a couple of our 
upstreams use other mechanisms instead.

I've had prefixes fall out of the IRR a couple of times, leading to 
outages of IRR-using transit providers.  I've had transit providers screw 
up manually maintained prefix-lists, or had mis-communications resulting 
in the wrong thing getting removed.  With multiple transit providers and 
multiple systems, they tend not to all have the same filtering problem at 
the same time.  That's a very good thing.

I hope the recommendation that comes out of this discussion is to filter 
somehow, rather than to use any particular filter-generation mechanism. 
Diversity and redundancy are good things, in processes as well as 
hardware.

-Steve