On Thu, 2002-05-23 at 11:22, Phill Groom wrote:
I think you may be letting your previous involvement with the WIX route servers colour your judgment slightly Dean!
Nah. I'm just trying to make sure that I have everyones point of view straight. Joe's first email wasn't clear enough for me, so I poked at him to clear it up. He did, all good. My main motovation for wanting to see this sorted out is that people are putting work into the route servers thinking that they can be the all shining all dancing things. Silently I doubt this, as I don't think any network of substance will peer with them ever. There was always a chance that it was just certain short-commings in the route-servers which were causing them to be underused. SO - I posted the message. All I wanted to know was. Are there things that can be done to bring the route servers to a state where people will peer with them. Or is it the largest waste of time ever. It may be still useful to do for small business (and I suspect that Citylink will continue to build them regardless), but I'd like to address the larger issue here. Are they ever going to be useful for national traffic. I don't care if the servers live or die, it just bothered me that people thought that they could be made to do a job that I don't think they will ever achieve. Love to be proved wrong here.
For what it's worth I agree with Joe's summary.
If I were representing a largish ISP/Telco in NZ (I'm not!) I would have a responsibility to a bunch of suits, lawyers and shareholders who would all demand accountability and profit. It is difficult to demonstrate a financial advantage and to guarantee continuity of service to existing customers from an uncontracted peering with parties unknown. This implies no criticism what so ever of the operator of the peering point nor of the route servers. It must be said however that BGP's first decision process is to ensure a valid next hop. If that next hop to the first party is passed to a third party by a second party then the third party really has no guarantee that the next hop is still valid nor that it is reachable. Given the stable platform that is APE/WIX this probably isn't a major issue, but no matter which vendor/technology/code you choose shit still happens!
Yep - so thats another vote for. "Nope, there is nothing you can do to the route servers to make me peer with them." Thanks Dean - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog