Qwest Support

Steve Naslund snaslund at interaccess.com
Thu Apr 4 23:39:41 UTC 2002


I would have to disagree on a lot of these points.  See below.

Steven Naslund

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Daniel Golding
> Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 5:25 PM
> To: Andy Dills; nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: RE: Qwest Support
>
>
>
> I suppose. Except it's not even certain you were having a problem of any
> kind at all.
>
> Qwest's presence or absence from public IX's really has nothing to do with
> your routes being announced. In fact, Qwest privately peers with all the
> other large networks. While there are many peering sessions at the public
> NAPs, most traffic is carried over private network interconnects, at least
> domestically. Certain peering points in Europe (Linx), tend to
> run the other
> way.
>

If the routes cannot be seen at the public IXs then a lot of people who are
connected to the public IXs will not see it either.  Depends if you are only
talking to the "big networks".

> In fact, if Qwest were publically peering with other networks, it
> might be a
> reason why your routes through UUNet were being prefered - private peer
> originated routes are almost always assigned higher local preferences in
> carrier networks, then public peer originated routes.
>

Local prefs are just that LOCAL.  They will not matter to other networks,
they
merely show the routes I prefer in and out of my network.  This should have
no
impact on AS path hop counts which is the primary method of selecting BGP
routes.



> I'm not sure your annoyance with Qwest has any basis in their lack of
> performance, as far as IP routing. BGP decision rules and other networks'
> routing policies will govern which paths are used for your routes. Here is
> an example...
>
> - Network X peers with UUNet in 8 locations. Network X also peers with
> Qwest, lets say in 6 locations. For whatever reason, network X chooses
> UUNet's routes to you over, Qwest's. This could be due to local routing
> policy, dictating that 701 routes get a higher local pref. Or AS path
> lengths could be the same, and the decision could be falling to something
> like router ID. Whatever.


What I would wonder here is : If network X prefers UUnet over Quest then
maybe
UUnet offers better performance than Quest.  I think that most networks will
not set a local pref unless there is a reason to override the default BGP
behavior
which is to use AS path length.  If service providers are avoiding Quest
there is
probably a good reason for it.  I don't think many people would try to give
UUnet
more preference that they already get by default, more likely networks lower
the
UUnet pref in order to balance their traffic.




>
> - In general, all the UUNet peering will get treated the same by
> Network X's
> routing policy. This won't always be the case, but let's say that none of
> the peering links are congested, etc. So, a certain number of paths are
> carried throughout Network X via iBGP. If UUNet's routes "won" at
> all those
> peering points, you will not see any paths through Qwest on a
> single carrier
> route server like Nitrous.

Not true.  Nitrous shows all routes it knows about whether they are
preferred or not.


>
> - Route-views, and the like are different animals. They get ebgp multihop
> views from many providers, so you will tend to see paths from
> many different
> vantage points, and are more likely to see paths from both your upstreams.
>
> ISPs get a heavy volume of calls every day. While Qwest may not have the
> greatest customer service, it's not like you were actually down or had a
> qwest originated routing issue. If that were the case, my
> sympathy would be
> greater.

How would Quest have known if he actually had a problem since they never
really
talked to him ?  What if he had a real routing problem ?




>
> - Daniel Golding
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Andy Dills
> Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 5:43 PM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Qwest Support
>
>
>
>
> Wow, Qwest support is indeed terrible.
>
> Turned up the DS3 today...the connectivity seems fine. I decided to check
> a couple of routeservers (nitrous); all had my much-prepended UUnet
> announcement, but NONE had my Qwest announcement. Not a huge deal, but
> curious to me.  Is Qwest just not at the public peering points? When I
> checked route-views.oregan-ix.net, I felt better, but yet annoyed. Even
> with the prepends, most networks were announcing UUnet's path.
>
> So I decided to call them and ask...man what a mistake. The guy is like,
> "Ok, hold on, let me get somebody from our IP noc." 10 minutes goes by,
> and he comes back with "Couldn't get anybody in the IP noc, let me try to
> get somebody in your install group" (being that I turned up the DS3
> today). Comes back another 10 minutes later with "Well, I left a message
> for them, but there isn't much I can do. Nobody seems to be answering
> their phone. If somebody doesn't call you back within 30 minutes, here's
> a number to call..."
>
> So what if my routes were actually hosed? I'd just be screwed because they
> can't get anybody at the IP noc?
>
> I wait. Nobody calls back within 30 minutes. I call the number he gave me.
> Busy. You gotta be kidding me.
>
> So I call the main number again, talk to somebody different. She has me
> hold, and then brings some guy on the line "who can help me". I start to
> talk about route servers, and he's immediately like "Woah, this is a BGP
> problem...I can't help you. Let me try to get somebody from the IP noc."
>
> So, I wait on hold for about 15 minutes, only to be given dial tone.
>
> Please tell me it isn't always THIS bad?
>
> Andy
>
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