A half of them has to be explained how route announcement is different from broadcasting. Forget about good citizenship -- they may be willing but they must be educated first. [...]
Educated by whom?
It seems to me that this education is one of the services that small ISPs ought to expect of their national service providers.
Huh? Where did you see "education" in terms of service contracts?
If a person goes in the business it is assumed that (s)he knows the profession. It is certainly not the case for many US-based Internet service providers.
The problem is that even a tiniest service provider doing BGP with some bigger provider can kill most of the Internet by injecting a single bogus route. (I expect to hear more "RS will fix everything" speech at this point. Relax. It is not here yet; and we had occasions when bogus routes were killing ANS connectivity per-network filtering notwithstanding. There are bugs and interesting incompatibilities :).
Such service provider doing multi-homed trick is simply a walking disaster. That's why we're making sure all parties involved understand the routing policy, safe networking practices, etc before we enable BGP.
Conversely, it seems that the rest of the community ought to expect that national service providers will be responsible for educating their customers, (e.g., ISPs).
Sounds kind of over-expectant. Considering that even large service providers have real bad problems with finding engineers who know what they are doing.
The best we can do is to limit the damage by doing fascistic filtering, and work with those ISPs who want to listen and really want to learn. Others will be out of business earlier or later anyway.
--vadim
Really? Fascistic filtering breaks connectivity. So you trade a *risk* of broken connectivity for KNOWN broken connectivity? Sounds like a poor trade to me, and one which, undertaken consciously and with knowledge of the repercussions, leaves you with being less than a full Internet connectivity provider. After all, if you're filtering perfectly valid announcements then you are, by definition, not providing connectivity to the "whole Internet" to the best of your ability, are you? The *better* path is to fix problems when they arise, and to drop peers if necessary until the problem site(s) become educated and/or fix the bad announcements being made to them. Is this a big job, and one which requires technical folks that know what they're doing -- on the job all the time? Yep. That's a cost of doing business in this game. The RS doesn't *fix* this per-se, but it does certainly give you fair warning of someone doing something known to be silly (like announcing a path which you know is authoritatively yours). -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity Modem: [+1 312 248-0900] | (shell, PPP, SLIP, leased) in Chicagoland Voice: [+1 312 248-8649] | 7 POPs online through Chicago, all 28.8 Fax: [+1 312 248-9865] | Email to "info@mcs.net" for more information ISDN: Surf at Smokin' Speed | WWW: http://www.mcs.net, gopher: gopher.mcs.net