The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

Sat Sep 29 02:41:51 UTC 2001

At 07:09 PM 9/28/2001 -0700, Sean M. Doran wrote:
 >Patrick writes:
 >
 >|  >Wouldn't it have been easier for small ISP to just aggregate?
 >|  >I mean, /19s got through after all!
 >|
 >| No, it would not have helped.  Assume the prospective customer has a link
 >| to UUNET and a /24, but wants a second link for [insert reason].  He now
 >| goes to SmallISP.com and asks for info on getting a second T1.  Then the
 >| Sprint sales guy calls him and mentions that IF AND ONLY IF he buys a line
 >| from Sprint, will Sprint hear his /24.
 >
 >Let's see.  Firstly, this is a valid point, although I wonder how
 >Sprint's sales person could possibly know she or he should call
 >the customer in the first place.  Unless Sprint is known to employ
 >psychics, this seems like a bit of a stretch in producing a bete noire.

Gimme a break.

s/the Sprint sales guy calls him and/he calls a Sprint sales guy who/

Geez.....

 >Secondly, /24 is not a small ISP, but wants a small ISP to back-up
 >connectivity to UUNET.  Valid goal.  However, asking small ISP
 >to ensure the world hears the hole in UUNET's CIDR block is not
 >a good solution.

Why not?

 >Instead:
 >
 >	1. this is one reason why NAT was invented in the first place,
 >           and (hopefully) NAT is feasible for /24 (which is not an ISP)

This would cause depletion of address space faster.

 >	2. where NAT is impractical or even undesirable, Tony Bates and
 >	   Yakov Rekhter have a solution in RFC 2260 tailor-made to this
 >	   situation

This does not address performance issues.

 >	3. the maximum 254 things in the /24 can be renumbered
 >           into small ISP's PA space and announced to UUWHO
 >	   with a constraining (set of) community(ies)
 >
 >	   (NAT, incidentally, was also invented to make renumbering easier)

All this does is swap the problem around, not solve it.

 >	4. "creative value-added approaches to this problem are sold for $"

Why bother, when ISP-X down the street will "just do it"?

 >If the premise that /24 is not an ISP is false, then it should
 >renumber anyway into PA space which is readily available and
 >a generally understood cost of business for transit providers/ISPs.

Agreed.

--
TTFN,
patrick