verio arrogance

Sat Jul 27 02:23:39 UTC 2002

In the referenced message, Stephen Stuart said:
> 
> > I can't really see why, as long as the provider has punched the
> > appropriate hole for your aggregate in their filters.  More specific
> > routes always win out.  Or am I missing your point?
> 
> The point, I think, is the effort involved in using global route
> announcements to solve your traffic engineering problems.
> 
> When you use provider-assigned space, you have to coordinate your
> intent to add entries to the global routing table with the provider
> who assigned the space and the providers that you want to accept the
> new routes.
> 
> When you use provider-independent space, you get to decide to add
> entries to the global routing table pretty much all by yourself,
> modulo running afoul of the occasional provider that does not, by
> default, buy into solving local traffic engineering problems in other
> people's networks using global routing table entries.
> 
> Stephen

Not to mention that the common retort is that everyone else in the world
should upgrade their CPU and memory to solve a third parties traffic
engineering problem. Thereby transferring the cost to others.

The verio (and others) mechanism involves a stated policy soundly
derived based upon RiR allocation policy. A policy which, if everyone
announced their aggregates would lead to no blackholes during steady-state.

If parties feel the need to exchange long prefixes, they can do so
privately, without infecting everyone. In fact, many providers exchange
regional routes, tagged no-export, for such mutual agreed-upon optimal
traffic exchange purposes. This should, however, be constrained to those
parties who mutually agree upon it.

However, there are some who want to handle their traffic engineering needs
preferably by transferring the costs to others. This is just shady, even
if it makes perfect "business sense" from a capitalistic "maximize profit
no matter what the consequences" mind set.

I wonder how the anti-filter folks would feel if all of their providers/peers
ceased filtering out iBGP routes on the sessions facing them. Would they
begin scrambling to filter? If so, where would the line be drawn? Some
arbitrary prefix-length, or based upon a published length obtained from
some allocation authority? What about if everyone ceased filtering
out their iBGP routes, and just leaked it all? Looking at only a single
router, I could add another 8538 prefixes into the routing system.
Certainly everyone could handle 9k more prefixes, right? Ok, then we get
to do that across all my routers. Then across all providers. This is all in
the name of optimal routing, right? What's a couple million routes between
friends?