[85271] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Cogent/Level 3 depeering
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leo Bicknell)
Thu Oct 6 20:07:50 2005
Date: Thu, 6 Oct 2005 20:07:24 -0400
From: Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Mail-Followup-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <200510061836.00072.lowen@pari.edu>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
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In a message written on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 06:36:00PM -0400, Lamar Owen w=
rote:
> All philosophy aside, it does bother me that a simple single depeering ca=
n=20
> cause such an uproar in a network supposedly immune to nuclear war (even=
=20
> though the Internet was not designed from the start to survive nuclear wa=
r;=20
> Paul Baran's packet-switching work aside; reference 'Where Wizards Stay U=
p=20
> Late' which quotes Taylor and others on the origins of the ARPAnet portio=
n of=20
> the old Internet). I shudder to think of what would happen if there were=
to=20
> be a real problem (I mean, really, one link (out of many thousands) is do=
wn=20
> and the Sky Is Falling!). What happened to resiliency?
I've seen a lot of comments about the "disruption" caused by this
depeering event, and what would happen if $bad_thing happened.
I point you back a few weeks to when the hurricane hit. You need
look no further to see people offering up their assistance to those
in need. Look back further to 9-11, and people offering networking
help to those who's infrastructure was damaged.
I have no doubt that if the Level 3 / Cogent issue had been caused
by a pre-emptive nuclear strike and the nation was called to arms
that virtually every ISP that connects to both would be offering
them free transit to get them reconnected.
Indeed, I could log into my routers now and fix the Cogent / Level
3 problem with about 3 minutes of typing. It would cost my company
thousands of dollars to do so, so I'm not going to do it. As I
said before, right now this is a business problem. By the same
token, if we were just attacked and Level 3 and Cogent were both,
together, asking for help I'd log in and have them working as fast
as I could type. I bet others would as well.
Level 3 and Cogent are able to fix their own problems in this case,
either by making up, or by entering into a business relationship
with a third party to fix it. This is also a problem that they,
themselves created. That's the difference here.
I've got a new set of rules to add to this thread:
If you don't have enable on a router, and you've never negotiated
peering with a transit free ISP then you're not qualified to comment.
You really don't understand what's going on here, and it's not, I
repeat, not a technical problem. There is nothing wrong with the
technology, architecture, or anything else. There is something
wrong with the business model of one, or both of these companies.
--=20
Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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