On Tuesday, May 21, 2002, at 10:41 , Dean Pemberton wrote:
So I want to tackle the issue of the WIX and APE route servers. Any why some people just don't love them.
If a network sends a prefix to another network, they are inviting the other network to send them traffic. If a network sends a prefix to a route server, they are inviting anybody who is able to receive routes from the route server to send them traffic. If you have business or technical criteria for selecting people to peer with, there may be advantages to knowing exactly who you are inviting to send you traffic. In most places in the world organisations enter into unilateral contracts with each other before setting up peering. If you enter into a multilateral contract with exchange participants, it's hard to stop peering with other people without stopping peering with everyone. Where the exchange fabric is more complicated than a single switch, there is also the risk that a network-layer topology constraint might block traffic between to networks when it is sent directly, but allow traffic between each network and the route server to flow normally (think multi-vendor, multi-switch exchange running bleeding-edge code from vendors with a shaky history of software stability and interoperability). If you follow a route learnt from the route server in that case, you will blackhole the traffic. Taking care to ensure that the traffic follows the signalling path can hence be useful. Joe - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog