On 2 jan 2008, at 22:34, Joe Abley wrote:
The community who would like the knob not to be "deaggregate" are the same ones that are doing the deaggregation, which I think is as it should be from a macro level
More precise: the two sets of people are part of the same community. I'm not sure if there's much overlap between the really bad deaggregators and those who are strongly pro-knob, though.
As to "there must be better knobs" I think it may be a little late for that; by design (or as a consequence of it) the set of IPv6 knobs is the same as the set of IPv4 knobs.
The trouble is that BGP doesn't have a meaningful inter-AS metric. (Although there is something that is called that.) If I want to increase my path length by 10% through a certain neighboring AS, I don't get to do that. I only get to double or triple it. (Unless I was doing very heavy prepending to begin with.) This is easy to fix by adding a new metric to BGP that is increased by 10 or 100 or 1000 at each hop by default, but which can also be increased by a larger or smaller amount as desired. In essence, this would make the AS path a lot more granular. Obviously this only works if a fairly large set of ASes implements this. However, word on the street is that in order to get a new BGP attribute defined in the IETF idr wg, you need assurances up front that people are actually going to implement and use that new attribute.