In a message written on Fri, May 16, 2003 at 05:28:37PM -0500, Guy Tal wrote:
All a matter of perspective. I would assume most people want to use closest exit on their networks. Imagine how nice it would be if you could hand off traffic to a peer that is your closest exit, then force them to carry the traffic back to you at that same point from across the country or across the globe!
Since this started off talking about customers, I must also point out: Many customers want MEDs to be honored. They don't want their transit provider, who they are paying money to carry the bits where they want them to be, to be closest exiting to them. I would think the most common configuration in large networks is to honor meds from customers, not honor them from peers, but send them to peers. Note I said common, and not majority. Do MEDs have their problems? Sure. Are they worse than the alternatives? I don't think so. A lot of people do a lot of handwaving about how dangerous it is to use meds. I find that funny, working on a global network that uses them without major problem. Do you have to avoid some situations, sure...but that's no different than if you don't use them. I know more than a few networks that avoid MPLS traffic engineering through clever use of meds, for instance, a good trade off in my book. At the end of the day the best advice I have is to be mindful of what you do with MEDS. Too many people like to ignore them, and that is a problem. Don't want to send them, fine, but be religous about getting rid of them everywhere or you'll cause problems. Want to use them, fine, but make sure they mean something and aren't garbage. Ignoring the consequences of meds in your config choices _will_ cause you problems. -- 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