[afnog] How to convince providers to take the sane option....

[Andrew Alston]

It's not really a rationale, it would seem from long conversations that providers are used to dealing in a situation where most of their peers at the exchanges are running default only, with no full table.  So in their minds, sending deaggregates to transit and aggregates to the exchange works, because the default is less specific.

However, the moment they encounter a provider that carries full table, things go sadly wrong, and trying to explain this to them seems to be a lot more difficult than one would imagine.

I had a scenario today where one of our customers (who is also present at the exchange), was coming through to our network, travelling out to Europe and coming back to another provider at the exchange. (We peer with the other provider).  When I raised this with the other provider, I was told, "The solution is that you should only ever be sending your customers a default route, that way, they will follow their own exchange connections".

To that I replied, if you sent the same routes to the exchange as to the transits, they would follow the exchange route anyway if they did sane local pref (customers over peers over transits), and wouldn't come through our network at all, which would be fine.  But there is no way that I'm reverting back to sending a customer a default only purely to solve another providers routing mess.

The whole situation is beyond bizarre!

To quote another provider: "It violates our policy to send specifics to the exchange" is the only answer I could get :(

Unfortunately, I also have to say that I believe what we are seeing here is the result of a massive amount of legacy hardware deployed that prevents people from running full table, if there was more full table deployment, these issues would have been seen and dealt with already (I assume)

Andrew



-----Original Message-----
From: afnog [mailto:afnog-bounces at afnog.org] On Behalf Of Roland Dobbins
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 8:09 PM
To: afnog at afnog.org
Subject: Re: [afnog] How to convince providers to take the sane option....


On May 13, 2014, at 10:18 PM, Andrew Alston <Andrew.Alston at liquidtelecom.com> wrote:

> Despite explaining the situation to the relevant providers, over and over again, and concretely demonstrating the negative effects of what they are doing, the only answer you get is "We aren't changing, we do traffic control like that"

Topological inefficiencies aside, what is their rationale for shifting this traffic to paid transit vs. (presumably) settlement-free peering over an IX?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Roland Dobbins <rdobbins at arbor.net> // <http://www.arbornetworks.com>

                   Equo ne credite, Teucri.

                          -- Laocoön


_______________________________________________
afnog mailing list
http://afnog.org/mailman/listinfo/afnog

DISCLAIMER:  This email contains proprietary information some or all of which may be legally privileged. It is for the intended recipient only. If an addressing or transmission error has misdirected this email, please notify the author by replying to this email. If you are not the intended recipient, you must not use, disclose, copy, print, or rely on this email.  We cannot accept liability for any statements made which are clearly the sender's own and not expressly made on behalf of this company or one of its agents.