My system administrator found a response to this article on a newsgroup
that he follows. Apparently the gentleman who wrote the article in
Boardwatch is not a very highly regarded individual. This response offers
another perspective on the situation.
>The guy is clueless and any ISP that looks to him for advice is even more
>clueless.
>
>A) Customers do not call and complain about sites greater than 30 hops
> away because they don't know this. The actual network diameter has been
> shrinking recently due to more exchange points and NAP's in operation
> so the 30 hop limit is highly unlikely to be reached.
>
>B) Yes your upstream might call you and tell you to renumber at any time.
> But you should know this
> ftp://rs.internic.net/policy/internic/internic-ip-1.txt
> and you should be prepared for this
> http://www.isi.edu/div7/pier
> and your provider will give you the time you need to renumber and
> reconfigure things. This is a fact of life everywhere in the world
> if you are a small ISP on today's Internet.
>
>C) Since you know all about renumbering in advance you should already
> have your customers ready to renumber painlessly or they should already
> be insulated from renumbering by using NAT's and RFC1918 addresses.
> Therefore there should be no fallout.
>
>D) If your network connection is not performing as it should, then you
> should know today! not tomorrow. You should be analyzing performance
> on a continuing basis and upgrading as needed to avoid bottlenecks.
> Loopback testing is just plain silly unless your tests show that
> your T1 can't handle a 1.54mbps to the next hop router.
>
>E) Sprint is not turning away small ISP traffic. They merely have a policy
> that filters traffic from small unaggregated networks. The word
> "unaggregated" is the key here because if your IP addresses come
> from your upstream provider then your small network *WILL* be
> aggregated and Sprint's filters will not affect you.
>
>F) This use of the words "dampen" and "meltdown" are completely out of
> context and have nothing to do with small ISP's at all. When large
> ISP's who run dynamic BGP routing protocols run into problems and
> oscillate between withdrawing and announcing routes, all the tier
> 1 NSP's (not just Sprint) dampen their BGP sessions to prevent the
> routers in the network core from being overloaded with too many adds
> and deletes in the routing tables. Meltdown is a cute way to say
> overload.
>
>G) This thing about trade laws is silly. Trade laws have no effect
> whatsoever on technology and technical capability. If there was
> a law that an airline could not refuse you a seat on an airline
> if you were there an hour ahead of time, would it make any difference?
> No, because when the plane is full, it is full and laws cannot
> change that.
>
>H) He attempts to make it seem as if the IETF is guaranteeing that
> there will be an Internet meltdown this year. Not true. Bob Metcalfe
> is predicting such a meltdown and he is probably an IETF member
> along with thousands of others who do not believe any meltdown is
> imminent.
>
>I) The Internet has *ALWAYS* been on the verge of collapse and
> probably always will be. This is better known as the free market
> as opposed to a monopoly market. The telcos have a monopoly
> so they can make you pay big bucks for an over-engineered network.
> But in a free market situation, the tier 1 NSP's, the tier 2 RNP's
> (Regional Network Providers) and the ISP's at tier 3 only add
> capacity when customers are ready to order and pay for that
> capacity. This is good because it keeps prices under control and
> relatively flat rate.
>
>J) All his 1, 2, 3, 4 points about Cisco routers are either wrong, minor
> problems, or things that have been fixed.
>
>K) Last year people though collapse was imminent when NSFnet shut down.
> But when it actually happened nobody noticed because everything worked
> fine. Later on, however, problems started to appear with route
> announcements as more ISP's started to use the BGP routing protocol
> but some smart engineer invented route dampening and Cisco promptly
> implemented it and the problem was promptly solved just in time. Kind
> of like things normally work in a free market -- see point I above.
>
>L) Of the three URL's given, two are wrong. One should be
> www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us and the other should be www.internic.net.
> Actually, www.ietf.org is easier to remember. Besides, I don't see
> what any of those URL's has to do with router shutdowns (rare) and
> Internet slowdowns.
>
>M) Now we have a garbled comment about Cisco routers that imply they are
> broken. In actual fact most tier 1 NSP's use Cisco routers because
> they are the only ones that can handle the complex mesh of the
> global Internet core and the traffic load at the core.
>
>N) Some mythical NANOG study is quoted to make some point or other
> which makes no sense to me. Obviously some reporter looked in on
> a bunch of network engineers talking about stuff that he doesn't
> understand and jumped to conclusions. I suppose he would be upset
> if somebody showed him that there was grease on the engine under
> the hood of his car! The real world is *NOT* seamless and sweet.
> There are real people, mechanics, engineers, etc, that make things
> works and deal with the grungy mess that underlies 100% of modern
> technical society. If you can't handle this, don't peek under the hood!
>
>O) I suppose I better deal with the specifics rather than just the
> generalities here. In this quote "A problem that Cisco routers have
> with the Internet Protocol itself is causing router update oscillation,
> link/router failures and congestion." it appears that Cisco routers
> have a fundamental flaw at the IP level. However the mention of
> router updates seems to point at BGP which is a higher level protocol.
> Sounds like yet another rehash of the BGP dampening code. In any case
> the important thing here is that engineers are studying what happens,
> discovering some things that don't work well, pinpointing why they
> don't work well, and *FIXING* them. Give the engineers a round of
> applause for discussing this in the open at NANOG instead of hiding it
> all behind a veil of secrecy.
>
>P) Two more URL's. One so general I don't see the point. The other one
> is broken. Don't these writers even use the Internet?
>
>Q) The column talks about Sprint's route filters as if they target small
> ISP's when in reality they target small networks who also have the
> mistaken idea that they can bypass the address allocation hierarchy and
> still get working addresses. Then it talks about address crowding which
> has nothing whatsoever to do with Sprint's filters. The filters are
> there as part of the impetus to reduce the size of the global routing
> table so it is not filled with garbage like this:
>
> 208.10.16/24 Fred's ISP --> send to Big ISP
> 208.10.17/24 Widget World --> send to Big ISP
> 208.10.18/24 Malls Electric --> send to Big ISP
> 208.10.19/24 Billy's BBS --> send to Big ISP
>
> Instead it should look like this
>
> 208.10.16/22 Some BIG ISP customers --> send to Big ISP
>
> which takes up less global routing table space and still
> gets the traffic where it is supposed to go.
>
>R) The columnist does not explain that Sean Doran's quote applies
> to the larger ISP's who are the ones running BGP and who should
> be controlling their routes so that they do *NOT* flap. It is
> punishing poorly run large ISP's and not small ISP's.
>
>S) It seems that Sprintlink customers are treated more leniently.
> So what, they pay Sprint for the service, don't they? If even
> one other tier 1 NSP implemented the same policy as Sprint then
> Sprint's lawyers (who wrote their customer contracts) would
> have the excuse they need to apply the same policy to Sprintlink
> customers.
>
>T) The columnist mistakenly refers to Yakhov Rekhter as "Cisco Systems'"
> whereas in fact IETF members *NEVER* represent the sompany they happen
> to work for at the time but only represent themselves.
>
>U) The hierarchical IP numbering scheme being discussed is in fact the
> scheme in place today and it has been so for some time. The IETF and
> IANA merely want to document this scheme and clarify it by publishing
> a Best Common Practices RFC so that it is easier for everybody to
> understand and explain what is going one. If this would cause you
> hardship, tough bananas! That's life. This is how things are in order
> to make the Internet operate effectively and if you didn't know this
> and make engineering and business plans accordingly then that's
> your problem. But it's never too late to educate yourself and to
> adjust your engineering and your policies to lessen the negative
> impact of hierarchical addressing.
>
>V) All this talk about fees for routes is just that. Talk. There isn't
> even an IETF working group yet for this topic but if you are real
> interested you can join piara@apnic.net (get ready to be flamed to a
> crisp if you ask dumb questions on this list) or better yet hunt up the
> PIARA mailing list archives at ftp.apnic.net I believe.
>
>W) This thing about "large providers blame small ISP's" is ludicrous. It's
> true that some few employees of large ISP's say nasty things about
> small ISP's but so what. The small ISP's who are clueless and do stupid
> things deserve to have nasty things said about them. There is such a
> wealth of educational material on the Internet about how to run an
> ISP and how to run a network that there really should not be any
> clueless small ISP's. Unless, of course, they think that $9.95
> per month all you can eat service is the road to riches :-(
>
>X) I'm not going to say much more about all this talk of mythical
> charges. Just be aware that anyone can say what they want but that
> does not mean it will happen. But do pay attention to the cost of
> renumbering. If you do not plan your network and your business
> from day 1 with renumbering in mind then it will hurt bad when you
> have to do it and it could kill your business. Be prepared.
>
>Y) This idea of ISP co-ops is sort of what a tier 2 Regional Network
> provider does. If you are a customer of Netaxs or TLG or IXA then
> not only are you somewhat insulated from a lot of these problems
> but you have a certain ammount of access to some very skilled
> people who can help you make sure your networks are properly designed
> and configured.
>
>Z) There is no power in owning IP address blocks because at the
> present time IP addresses are not owned. Right now the power
> is in having a *WORKING* IP address block and that is intimately tied
> in to your choice of upstream provider. And if you change providers
> then you will have to change IP address blocks in order to retain
> that power of having a working address.
>
>*sigh*
>That guy gets paid for writing his confusing mish-mash of a column
>and I get paid nothing for writing this explanation which I have
>gone to some trouble in making as accurate as possible.
>
>Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting
>Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049
>http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
--Bill Butler Bill@Telalink.Net President, Chief Operating Officer 615.321.9100 ext.230 Key fingerprint = 11 B6 5E FB 6C 9C 3A 54 EB 6D 57 5E D4 13 6D 38
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