Network for Sale

Kevin Oberman oberman at es.net
Tue Feb 20 16:17:40 UTC 2001


> Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 23:41:58 +0800
> From: Adrian Chadd <adrian at creative.net.au>
> Sender: owner-nanog at merit.edu
> > On the same breath, why aren't people using route-servers at NAPs?

There are probably three reasons:

1. People don't understand the concept of the route servers. They know
about setting up a traditional peering, though.

2. People worry (justifiably) of black-holing traffic because the
route server assumes that all of it's peers have the same reachability
to it as they do to each other. This is normally the case, but there
are several cases of failures at NAPS where this was not the case. Al
were transitory, but they did result in loss of traffic. At least One major
provider refuses to use RSes for this reason.

3. People do not maintain their routing policies in the IRR causing
the route servers to not advertise routes that they should. I spoke
with the NOC of a "tier-1" which used the RAs at NAPs but had not
updated it's policy in YEARS! They had picked up a few customers since
then and the route servers were advertising less than 10% of the
routes the provider was carrying. Makes a RS peering pretty
useless. nd there have actually been many such cases.

Take a look at http://www.rsng.net/rs-views/. Pick a route server and
then a participant with a non-zero number of peers exported to. Check
the number of "grey" routes vs. the number of "green" routes. Grey
routes are those not in the provider's policy. Green ones are. For MANY
providers, the number of grey routes exceeds the number of green
route. This makes use of the route servers at least a bit problematic.

We have switched several peers to direct peering for this last reason.

R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634




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