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I get endless number of customers who want to peer with more than one ISP at a time, usually with the intention of resiliency at both the institutional and upstream provider levels. [... Want Class C, public AS, advertised prefix... ] Now ... what I was thinking is ... can we do this without the rare (and increasingly difficult to obtain) Public AS numbers.
I'm also in touch with clients that would like to do this -- they don't especially care about the Class C, or Public AS, etc, but they would like some resiliency for any disconnections from their provider or routing issues for their provider, often because they have clients that have that as a tick-box feature.
Could we have a publically agreed on pool of Private AS numbers that enterprises can use to peer with service providers. The pool would administered by a "impartial" group (maybe WIX/APE). The AS number would then be stripped by both higher-order ISPs and and the IP address potentially unsuppressed by the ISP who owns the IP address aggregate.
If I'm not mistaken about what you mean, this is what WIX (the route reflectors) are trying to do. Enterprises on Citylink with an appropriate connection, but without public ASes are assigned a private AS, advertise their routes to the WIX route reflectors with that private AS, and the WIX route reflectors then advertises those to all other peers. APE may also have a similar setup, but my impression is that APE is mostly bilaterial peering, and it's mostly treated as a peering point, rather than a multilateral route exchange. The WIX approach seems to work, but: - it appears some providers do not peer with the WIX route reflectors, or do so only to advertise their routes, not to allow in extra routes - most providers filter "long" prefixes (and most enterprises without public ASes tend to have only long prefixes). Certainly it's my impression that pretty much all providers filter anything longer than /24, and some appear to even filter /24, /23, /22, etc, meaning the prefixes advertised by enterprises are likely to be filtered. So from an enterprise point of view WIX (the route reflectors) are useful for picking up direct routes to providers POPs, but this tends to lead to asymetric routes to/from the providers (and hence no real resiliency). And it's useful for enterprise to enterprise peering (indeed one of my clients connected to the WIX route reflectors soley for the enterprise to enterprise peering; at the request of the other enterprise). The WIX route reflectors (according to the route table on a router peering with them) appears to have about 50 systems peering with it at present. But without providers willing to (a) peer with the route reflectors, and (b) accept long prefixes (at least locally), it's probably not going to be of general use for resiliency. To be of much general use providers would have to be willing to at least accept /24 prefixes locally, even if they're part of a larger supernet advertised by another provider. Longer prefixes would be desirable, because otherwise anyone wanting resilency with CIDR space would need to beg for a class-C sized CIDR chunk. Simon Blake (Citylink) could probably speak more about what WIX's route reflectors do, and how well it's worked (or not worked) in practice. Ewen - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog