Sprint and peering points

Sat Mar 31 19:51:15 UTC 2001

* Josh Richards <jrichard at cubicle.net> [20010331 11:23]:
> * Roy <garlic at garlic.com> [20010331 08:13]:
> > 
> > Needless to say I am a bit pissed at Sprint for doing this and not telling
> > me.  I had been a fan of Sprint until this happened.  Anyone else out there
> > seeing the same problems?  Any ideas on how to cure it
> 
> You could prepend your non-Sprint upstreams. 

Oh, you said you're "pissed at Sprint for doing this and not telling me".
Routing changes all of the time though depending on 
topology/contracts/politics/PoPs/peers/etc.  I don't see any easy _useful_
way for transit providers to communicate this information to their 
customers.  I also may not be looking hard enough.

<thinking out loud>

Keep in mind that every multi-homed customer is going to be affected in 
very different ways by changes such as this.  It will depend a lot on who 
the other transit providers are.  I'm not saying that knowledge of these 
types of changes is not useful, I'm saying that to convey these types of 
changes in a useful manner would appear to be difficult.

For example, supposed Sprintlink conveyed (via Web/e-mail/whatever) the 
following to you just before making the change:

  We are bringing up some new private peering connections.  As a result we 
  will be migrating much of our existing traffic destined for ASNs 209, 701,
  and 1 and exchanged on the public fabrics at MAE-West, MAE-Eest, and PAIX
  to private links.  The public links will remain in place with prepending 
  to encourage usage of the private links.  We will be prepending three 
  times.  Happy route tweaking!

Would you have known just how this would effect your other upstreams?  Do
you know your upstreams' routing policies at every interconnect they have?

I guess you could make your public routing policy detailed enough to include 
specifics on each peer. That might do it -- but realize how long this policy 
could be for a network of reasonable size (hundreds, if not thousands of BGP
neighbors -- from peers to all customers).  Actually, what about RADB?

I'll also warn you that I've not had any coffee as of yet.  I'll go do that 
now and likely come back to several replies pointing to errors in my 
reasoning above. :-)

</thinking out loud>

-jr

----
Josh Richards [JTR38/JR539-ARIN]
<jrichard at geekresearch.com/cubicle.net/fix.net/freedom.gen.ca.us>
Geek Research LLC - <URL:http://www.geekresearch.com/>
IP Network Engineering and Consulting
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