On Wed, 12 Aug 2009, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
I would make the opposite argument, my business would NEVER go to any network which didn't support IRR (and a bunch of other simple but important things, like a full set of non-secret BGP communities). It's amazing the number of networks that excludes in this day and age. And not even because "omg IRR is good because someone told me so and we should support it", but because I've seen FAR too much grief caused by humans typoing prefix-lists, or taking days to process them. It is the height of absurdity that this would ever be considered an acceptable solution to the problem.
I'd be very hesitant to use an upstream that didn't use any filtering method. But, as convenient as I find the IRR system to be (from the customer perspective, at least), I'm quite happy that a couple of our upstreams use other mechanisms instead. I've had prefixes fall out of the IRR a couple of times, leading to outages of IRR-using transit providers. I've had transit providers screw up manually maintained prefix-lists, or had mis-communications resulting in the wrong thing getting removed. With multiple transit providers and multiple systems, they tend not to all have the same filtering problem at the same time. That's a very good thing. I hope the recommendation that comes out of this discussion is to filter somehow, rather than to use any particular filter-generation mechanism. Diversity and redundancy are good things, in processes as well as hardware. -Steve