coprorations using BGP for advertising prefixes in mid-1990s

Fri May 13 15:09:11 UTC 2011

> From: Tony Li <tony.li at tony.li>
> Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 16:47:54 -0700
> 
> On May 12, 2011, at 2:37 PM, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> 
> > Does no one remember EGP? ASNs are MUCH older than BGP. And we were
> > using BGPv3 prior to the existence of V4. We used BGPv4 back in the days
> > when Tony Li would chastise us for reporting a bug in a 10 day old Cisco
> > build saying that we could not expect BGPv4 code over a week old to
> > work. He felt that we should deploy new code daily.
> 
> 
> To be fair, that was for folks on the isp-geeks mailing list, who were
> effectively doing alpha test with me.  I was fixing about 1
> significant bug per day and doing at least one release per day.  10
> day old code was missing at least 10 fixes...  ;-) And that was BGP3.
> BGP4 was the next developer.
> 
> Regards,
> Tony
> 

Yes, Tony. It was absolutely fair. It was certainly not your (or
Cisco's) fault. It was a huge effort on the part of a small number of
Cisco engineers (I assume that you and Paul wrote most of the code) to
get a complex protocol stable and ready for implementation in far too
little time. It was utter insanity and it all worked! (Just in time for
the death of the PRDB).

In no way was I criticizing your efforts. I just remember that message
and thinking how much testing and planning we do today before rolling
new code onto production systems. The idea of reloading production
routers with code we absolutely knew would prove buggy on a weekly (or
more than weekly) basis seems so unimaginable today.

I'm looking forward to seeing Milo at NANOG 52 next month in Denver! I'm
sure that he remembers all of this.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751