In a message written on Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 12:16:07AM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
I think most customers don't know how this works. Maybe someone should write a book that explains this kind of stuff...
I'm not so sure I'd come to that conclusion. I think when most customers see a problem on their transit providers network they would rather open up a ticket with their transit provider, and have them solve the problem. Most people I see using this feature fall into two catagories. The first type doesn't believe the provider can fix the problem but is forced to use them (due to price, management, whatever) and uses this to avoid their NOC because it doesn't work. The second type of person believes they can actually do a better job of routing than their upstream. This may even be true in some cases (where the customer has several transit providers all supporting this 'feature'), however I suspect in many cases the customer is actually making their own life worse. In general what this means is rather than having a couple of standard route-map's/route-policies that get configured once and applied to all peers you end up with a per-peer specific configuration. It would seem to me that the opportunity for mistakes is grealy increased. Even if we assume all the people using it really need it, is it worth risking the performance of 500 or 1000 customers for the 5-10 who actually use the features? -- 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