[91418] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Global Crossing Contact / BGP and SONET interaction question
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ian Mason)
Wed Jul 26 09:04:00 2006
In-Reply-To: <44C719C3.3020403@mt.net>
From: Ian Mason <nanog@ian.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 14:03:25 +0100
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 26 Jul 2006, at 08:29, Forrest W Christian wrote:
>
> Randy Epstein wrote:
>> I don't have an answer to the root cause of your problem, and I'm
>> not looking for a discussion on route dampening (there are enough
>> debates onthis issue to make your head spin), but may I suggest
>> you raise your hold timers to prevent your BGP sessions from going
>> down on short disturbances as these?
> From what I can tell the disturbances are less than a second in
> duration. It doesn't appear that this is a hold-timer issue,
> although I would like GX to set it at something higher than 90
> seconds (mine is already at a higher value- but the lower value
> wins during negotiation). I really suspect that either a) GX has
> some semi-weird configuration where the SONET ring switching from
> the normal to the protect path and back causes BGP to reset on the
> border router I'm attached to or b) There is a separate issue which
> is causing BGP to flap. Or of course, something else completely
> different.
>
> Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to talk to
> anyone at GX which actually has access to the routers and knows
> anything about BGP.
> -forrest
The timing of protection switching on a SONET ring is of completely
the wrong order to upset a BGP session. From memory there's a
designed in upper bound of 200 mS from fault to fully restored with
typical values being more like 50 mS.
One possibility that occurs to me is that the A end here might be
using a router with a SONET card, and the router software is
propagating a SONET event through the stack causing BGP to react to
an event it wouldn't even see on a physically separate SONET ADM.
That is pure speculation though.
