seeing the trees in the forest of confusion

Sat Apr 26 19:55:01 UTC 1997

> These cases seem to point to a problem with BGP route withdrawls that will
> continue to increase the time it takes to recover from network problems.
> Perhaps the router vendors would like to comment.

This seems inappropriate to me.

You have just said: "I sat and watched a provider keep routes around
long past their being withdrawn, and they didn't know what to do so
suggested two kludges: 1) advertising more-specifics and 2) rebooting
routers. Could some vendor comment on this problem?".

This is every vendor's worst nightmare.

Every vendor necessarily (and rightly so!) provides all users enough
rope to hang themselves with. It seems inappropriate for someone who
doesn't know what the full story is to call vendors to account.

If the provider in question adjusted some knobs and settings so as to
cause such a problem, what is the vendor to do?

How could the vendor even come close to trying to explain the problem
without detailed information about the problems and configurations?

Pessimistically speaking, it seems that there are two ways that this
thread could come to a close:

	1)	People will keep badgering the vendor and the vendor
		will come out looking ugly if they cannot account for
		the problem based on insufficient data.

	2)	People will all be quiet and stop complaining until
		the operator(s) in question and vendor(s) have information
		and communicate it.

2) seems obviously preferable, but I suspect that the people on this
list will go for 1) since it will allow everyone to flame and chatter
incessantly, increasing NANOG mail volume and everyone's productivity.

If anyone who has seen this problem first hand has detailed technical
information to provide, that is of course useful and welcome in this
forum. But complaining without having any of the data? What's the point?

--jhawk