expectations for bgp peering?

Wed Jan 21 05:52:37 UTC 2009

Apologies for top posting, but my response is a little long long...

I wouldn't be too concerned about the multi-hop as there're many reasons why they might do that, but a week out and it's still not working?  It's all about customer service.  Are they giving you the appropriate level of service you expect for what you're paying?  If not, vote with your dollars and move on...

Usually, I get the circuit up and pingable to the IPs that will be doing the peering ahead of time.  I then set a date for the BGP turn up.  On my side, BGP is pre-configured and all I have to do is type 'no shut'.  Most times everything comes up and we all go home happy. Sometimes I have to do a little troubleshooting.
If they got the lower layers up ahead of time with you, set a date to turn up BGP and now it's a week later, I'd be worried about what type of customer service they'd give later on when trouble happens.  

And they don't allow you to prepend?  In my book that'd be two strikes against them and this isn't baseball, so I wouldn't wait for the third strike.

scott

--- mike-nanog at tiedyenetworks.com wrote:

 So I am just wondering what my expecations should be in a bgp peering 
scenario where I am multihomed with my own ASN and arin assigned ip 
space. At issue is the fact that my backup isp forced me to use ebgp 
multihop to peer with a router internal to their network and not the 
border router I am directly attached to, and secondly, that they say I 
am not allowed to prepend at all - they will do it for me, and from the 
looks of things they have established a route-map that just prepends 
their AS 6 times to my announcement.

    This smells of bad engineering. I have looked up the bgp report for 
my provider and they have 0 downstream AS's, and the week that this 
project has taken (and it's still not up and working) has left me with 
less than absolute confidence in the provider. I want to know if anyone 
has an opinion on ebgp multihop for external customers, and wether I 
should really have an expectation to be able to assign my prepends as 
suits my needs? Are there any conditions that could make this fail that 
I should be aware of?

Mike-