The Cidr Report

Sun Dec 12 18:30:12 UTC 2004

[This was started last month. been a little busy. unsuprisingly I 
only had to *add* an incident and it still works.]

On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 02:47:30PM -0800, Randy Bush wrote:
[snip]

Yes it means what you think.
No, I don't see anyone giving a rat's patootie about aggregation.

I was starting to think I was the only one still reading the reports.
Had a half-written rant each time interesting events happened, just
been too busy. In recent months:
- on the 4th->5th of November, the (reported) table bloated by ~9k 
  pfefixes overnight. not an eyebrow raised.
- when the table bloated over 140k, just this last July, the report 
  was hosed at the end of a cycle obviously hit its own MAXINT. Not 
  a comment from regular report readers, nor even a mocking Nelson 
  "Ha-Haw" post by those taking the actions.
- this month, another knee was at 150k [Dec 4th] and similarly 
  garbled results came out. Again, no response.
...in this one year we've seen the shape of the climb return to the 
curve characterized by two years 99-01. Going for e?  I'm not quite 
sure what the current point of the report is if no-one responds to
even it breaking.

I never saw a single post following up to to the actual purpose 
and policy issues from October's "aggregation & table entries" 
thread. Other than the specifics of multihomed customers and RPF 
issues, my point about segregation of internal and externaal 
policies and the reflection in the "announce used" vs "announce 
allocated" was neither agreed, refuted, nor even commented further.
I have seen deaggregators claim 'security' [shred the routing table 
in response to windows worms scanning their classical-B], or 
assume that if Some Other Company can base their entire business 
plan on moving the costs of 'optimized' deaggregation onto the 
global community (beyond their providers), then why can't they.

When I'm feeling conspiracy-minded, it seems that those of a 
certain size are trying to squeeze the smaller folks out of the 
business by encouraging the behavior of bloat.  But then I correct 
the angle of my tinfoil beanie and realize they are just lazy.  
Their laziness does directly cost any newly-multihoming enterprises; 
some of the networks who are contributing to the garbage still 
tell customers that full tables will fit into 128M on a cisco.
(eg, http://www.sprintlink.net/support/bgp_request.html)

It is disappointing and frankly I can't see a way past it.  When 
2914 finally slid down to the lowest common denominator, the last 
'big stick' was gone.  1239 is unapologetically violating their 
own customer bgp policies in this regard (point 9 on
http://www.sprintlink.net/policy/bgp.html). The list goes on and 
on.

Otherwise reasonable people have refuted logic and claim adding 
more data into the system doesn't increase churn effect and thereby 
degrade stability. Control theory and structured programming be 
damned, they say "it hasn't melted yet." Perhaps they want to see 
if they can make Metcalfe's predict come true, just 10 years too
early?  

The baseline expectation is that the DFZ carries rechability data.
Any more-specific data of interest is exchanged between parties who 
want it, request it, or pay for it. "Being conservative in what you 
send" also applies to anticipating *others* not being liberal in 
what they receive.  There's a whole lot of non-conservative senders 
out there, and when they have reachability problems of their own 
making, with simple and trivial fixes if they had only thought 
things through in the first place, they have no-one but themselves 
to blame.

Those believing otherwise are encouraged to send real, hard data.
There is no meaningful data I can find since the Bellovin/Bush/
Griffin/Rexford 2001 paper.

Joe

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