Arbitrary de-peering

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Mon Jul 28 15:29:57 UTC 2008


On Jul 28, 2008, at 11:24 AM, William Waites wrote:
> Le 08-07-28 à 17:12, nancyp at yorku.ca a écrit :
>
>> ----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at  
>> work in
>> March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in  
>> Europe.
>> [...] York’s bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a  
>> peering relationship
>> with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia [...] which was  
>> the bandwidth
>> network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to  
>> reach. [...]
>> Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and  
>> the loss of
>> connectivity. Unreachability due to arbitrariness in network  
>> peering is unacceptable.
>
> There must be more to this story. If Cogent de-peered from Telia the  
> traffic would
> normally just have taken another path.

One should check one's assumptions before posting to 10K+ of their not- 
so-close friends.

Neither network has transit.  What other path is there to take?

Once you answer that, I'll read the rest of your e-mail.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick


> Either there was a configuration error of some
> sort or else some sort of proactive black-holing on one side or the  
> other. As the
> latter would be surprising and very heavy handed, I would tend to  
> suspect the former.
>
> Peering relationships are made and severed all the time with no  
> particular ill-effects,
> unless you can point to examples of outright malice (i.e. of the  
> black-holing kind) I
> don't think there is much basis for any public policy decisions in  
> this example.
>
> Unreachability due to configuation error is of course relatively  
> common; perhaps I am
> wrong, but I don't think the CRTC would really have much to say  
> about that.
>
> Cheers,
> -w





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