On Fri, 19 Jun 1998, Simon Blake wrote:
1. Establish a second emulated LAN on CityLink for BGP peering between cooperating network operators. This will consist of a series of bilateral agreements between individual network operators. No customers should connect to ISPs over this network - this will be a "clean" IP-only network.
While I appreciate that the ISP's primary desire is an interconnect to exchange data with their "peers" (in the loosest sense of the word) on a national basis, I would really like to see an exchange set up in Wellington that also allowed any local organisation to peer on the WIX for *local* traffic.
I think that makes a lot of sense as well, although I am slightly disturbed by reports of broadcast IPX, Appletalk and NetBEUI traffic flowing helter-skelter over the current emulated LAN :) There is a technical problem surrounding the use of the current eLAN for BGP peering. ISPs who exchange routes using BGP over WIX will have route objects tagged within their interior BGP process with a next-hop address from network 10.0.0.0/8, since that is the addressing scheme used across the customer-access eLAN. This presents potential problems (ppp :) since it presupposes that the 10.0.0.0/8 network is carried by each ISP's interior routing protocol which CLEAR for one is not able to do cleanly (10 is used for private CLEAR networks). We could continue to use the existing eLAN with a globally-unique address range, but that would involve multiple ARPs per router interface across the network. In my experience networks which layer multiple subnet addressing schemes across the same broadcast network are almost always messy and fraught with problems. YMMV :)
With the advent of more 100Mb/s+ connections, and the increasing desire of local organisations to use Citylink to move massive amounts (A2 full colour spreads, for eg) of data between themselves, this situation isn't likely to improve. Therefore it seems desirable that Citylink attached organisations be able to communicate amongst themselves, without needing to pass through an ISP's router.
I think this is an admirable goal, but bear in mind that customers' packets travel through a customers' router before they hit WIX anyway - is an ISPs router likely to be a bigger bottleneck than that?
So, while the ISP's do need a bilateral peering point where individual operators can choose whether to (in effect) carry other ISP's data on their national network, I would like to see a tandem system implemented where local Citylink users can share routes for locally attached networks amongst themselves.
Sorry if I was unclear in my previous post; I was putting forward the idea that each peering ISP would maintain two connections to Citylink eLANs - one for customer access, one for peering. And by ISP I mean "anybody who is keen to persue BGP peering with other network operators in NZ". I just assume that most of these are likely to be ISPs. As far as customers are concerned everything would work as it does now, since I am not proposing any changes to the way that the CityLink managed IP service works.
I'd also observe that VLAN's aren't (yet) a product of Citylink, (although our current backbone switches do support them), and probably won't be until somebody asks. So it behooves the ISP's concerned to get a request into Richard and Alan so that they can get the product development wheels in motion.
2. To make (1) as smooth as possible, individual operators should make efforts to install up-to-date route entries and associated policy into the Merit (Route Arbiter) routing registry. This will also help with a similar operation on NZIX.
Citylink are/can provide hardware to make a local RA registry a reality, which is presumably necessary if non AS numbered entities want to join the IX?
The consensus seems to be that an additional route arbiter database doesn't really add any value - it makes more sense for WIX-peering ISPs to use the Merit RADB in Michigan. This avoids repeated records in national and global route registries which, in practice, will always differ to some degree. All peering partners will need AS numbers in order to peer using BGP. AS numbers cost US$500 setup and then US$50/year from APNIC (for non-members - they are available free to members). I would have thought this was within the financial scope of all NZ ISPs who are not APNIC members. Customers who use an ISP via CityLink do not need to peer, as their provider is effectively doing it for them. However, a customer who wanted service from more than one ISP for backup purposes could BGP-peer with the ISPs concerned exactly as it is proposed ISPs do between each other. A locally-run route server (which draws its policy from the Merit RADB) might make sense if we find a large number of ISPs wanting to peer; however, if the number of peering ISPs/customers is low (say, below 10) then I think it's not really worth the trouble.
4. A class C network will be obtained from ISI by ISOCNZ. This costs US$500. ISOCNZ will bill a proportion of this amount to all the initial participants in WIX. The corresponding in-addr.arpa zone will be run by NetLink on behalf of the peering community, in much the same way as wix.net.nz.
With a bit of arm twisting, I could probably squeeze a couple of unused pre-CIDR Class C's out of WCC - would that be a useful/cheaper alternative? Citylink would (I imagine) also be happy to act as a neutral party for DNS maintenance or ISI billing.
Bear in mind that any ISP may source packets from an address on this
subnet - so if the Cs you are thinking of are advertised as part of a
supernet (at WCC's expense) you will potentially be carrying ISPs traffic
globally.
If the Cs are not part of larger supernet routes, then you should be fine.
Could you give a firm indication on whether a non-globally-advertised WCC
class C could be made available, or whether WCC is keen to administer the
payment for an ISI-supplied class C network?
Joe
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Joe Abley