[181081] in North American Network Operators' Group

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Re: Anycast provider for SMTP?

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Herrin)
Mon Jun 15 14:55:10 2015

X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
X-Really-To: <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <CCAC5BF6-8442-4ACB-A7F0-A547A6FBF748@pch.net>
From: William Herrin <bill@herrin.us>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2015 14:54:40 -0400
To: Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>, Joe Hamelin <joe@nethead.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org

On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:13 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> wrote:
> Or you could skip the MX records, and just put both US and European
> SMTP servers on the same IP address, which would save a lot of
> steps and simplify the system, but leave you with the _very_
> occasional corner-case of someone equal-path-length load-balancing
> traffic to you such that half of one TCP session goes to Europe, and
> half the the US.  That=E2=80=99s a bogeyman that scares a lot of people i=
nto not
> using anycast for TCP services, particularly long-lived ones, but it=E2=
=80=99s a
> theoretical problem rather than an actually-observed-in-the-wild problem.
> But since it scares people, it=E2=80=99s probably safer just doing the DN=
S
> anycast, rather than SMTP anycast, to avoid startling the
> easily-upset out there.  :-)

If I had a dollar for every system that's collapsed from a known but
previously "theoretical" problem... It's only theoretical until a VIP
can't connect. Deploy a system without covering the corner cases and
your comeuppance is assured.

Okay, granted you can probably cover your corner case here with a
priority 20 MX that leads to a unicast address on one of the two
servers. SMTP can let the rare fellow with the bisected packet flow
gracefully fall back.

Nevertheless, I think you've offered some really bad advice here Bill.
Hijackers killing the passengers was a bogeyman too. If you just kept
calm and cooperated, you lived through it. Until you didn't, and
allowed yourself to be an instrument in killing thousands on the
ground as a bonus. Sometimes the math offers really bad advice.


On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
> On 15/06/2015 19:09, William Herrin wrote:
>> Anycast + TCP =3D much pain, for reasons which should be obvious.
>
> This was presented at some conference or other a couple of years ago:
> https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog37/presentations/matt.levine.pdf

Thought the comment on page 22 was apropos: their plan is to be dead
before future change catches up with them.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--=20
William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com  bill@herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>

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