[8185] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: consistent policy != consistent announcements
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Mar 15 11:29:32 1997
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@bbnplanet.com>
To: apb@iafrica.com (Alan Barrett)
Date: Sat, 15 Mar 1997 11:14:32 -0500 (EST)
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.95.970315130455.162t-100000@apb.iafrica.com> from "Alan Barrett" at Mar 15, 97 01:22:02 pm
> Yes. Suppose that I am "M", and I have two providers "A" and "B". The
> links M/A and M/B are expensive international links, much lower bandwidth
> than I would like, and prone to congestion. Further suppose that A is a
> customer of R, and B is a peer of R. For load balancing reasons, I would
> like R to send some of my traffic via A and some via B. Since I pay A and
> B for transit, and A pays R for transit, and A and B both agree to play
> along with my desire to load balance, it's reasonable for us to ask R to
> do this.
> From R's point of view, their customer A and their indirect customer
> M have asked them to treat peer routes (via B) and customer routes
> (via A) to destinations in M as being equivalent.
This is just plain difficult to orchestrate, if one asks R to treat
some subset of peer routes as transit routes.
Far better to adopt the reverse solution of having R de-preference
the routes received from A to be an equivalent localperf to those
received from B. That is, give special treatment to a subset of
customer roues, and continue to treat all peer routes the same.
RFC1998 provides a very nice example of this, as implemented by
one provider (MCI).
Nevertheless, this is not a panacea.
Peers of R may still receive routes with different as-paths, but
as-path lengths and origin codes (which matter for selection) should
at least be the same, which should be sufficient.
--jhawk
