On Thu, 28 May 1998, Sean Donelan wrote:
The purpose of the /20's and /19's on our 165.138.0.0, 165.139.0.0 and 157.91.0.0 networks was to provide better service to our customers and to try and save IP address space for others. Like some of the class A's above we treated these as CIDR blocks instead of going to our upstream providers or the ARIN to get more addresses. Because our network has a dozen pops thoughout the state and each has at least one upstream connection to Sprint and MCI we advertise them as the /19's and /20's. This provides the greates redundancy for our customers. Sprint's policy does not apply to customer routes so they do not filter at the /16 level for classic B addresses. (They do for everybody else though....)
Sure. It makes sense. Just have sprint change their policy about filtering non-customers, and I'd be happy to do the same. Otherwise it seems a bit hollow to say Sprint's filters are saving the Internet from collapse when they allow they customers do do the exact thing they are telling everyone else is a bad idea.
Of course, it does lock you into SPRINT for all times, since if you ever become a non-customer, they will begin filtering your routes no matter how sensible the idea.
I'm a customer of Sprint and I can say two things, one they have gotten a lot better this year in overall quality of service and two their filtering policy is very outdated & Sprint's customers seem to have the most violations of the policy. It does appear that the policy is enforced with peers like MCI and UUnet on routes Sprint learns from them, but not visa versa. Looking quickly over the MCI, ANS, and UUnet routes (via 'show ip bgp neighbor x.x.x.x received-routes') I see the Sprint AS's pop up in a lot of the CIDR routes, (/24 - /19) esp in the old class B range (look at 129.122.0.0.) Sprint's got GSR's now and they haven't had any network wide BGP flaps like they did a 12-18 months ago, even though the current policy was used at that time. Because of the shortage of IP addresses I think your going to see a lot more attempts to squeeze CIDR blocks out of the remaining class A's and B's, if we use them we'll have addresses for a couple of more years. (might even cut the routing tables if people can stand renumbering and turning in their /19's and such for a /16, /15, /14 or so.....) As a customer I'm asking Sprint to pull the filters on non-customers. I'd urge other customers to do the same. ------ P.S. Sean, I took a /20 that we haven't used yet and just advertised it to MCI - the route didn't make it into the Sprint tables. But it also didn't make it into your network even though it appears that you have a direct connection to MCI.....are you using the same filter on MCI? If so are you having problems getting to some of the networks I mentioned in my other email? INDY1#traceroute Protocol [ip]: Target IP address: 150.147.1.1 Source address: 165.138.16.254 Numeric display [n]: Timeout in seconds [3]: Probe count [3]: Minimum Time to Live [1]: Maximum Time to Live [30]: Port Number [33434]: Loose, Strict, Record, Timestamp, Verbose[none]: Type escape sequence to abort. Tracing the route to StLouis21-e1.dra.net (150.147.1.1) 1 bordercore4-hssi6-0-2.NorthRoyalton.mci.net (166.48.234.9) [AS 3561] 300 msec 272 msec 32 msec 2 core1.NorthRoyalton.mci.net (204.70.4.205) [AS 3561] 20 msec 28 msec 24 msec 3 core-hssi-2.Chicago.mci.net (204.70.1.93) [AS 3561] 32 msec 28 msec 32 msec 4 border4-fddi-0.Chicago.mci.net (204.70.3.83) [AS 3561] 36 msec 32 msec 36 msec 5 * * * 6 * * etc...... ----but using MCI's IP---- INDY1#traceroute 150.147.1.1 Type escape sequence to abort. Tracing the route to StLouis21-e1.dra.net (150.147.1.1) 1 bordercore4-hssi6-0-2.NorthRoyalton.mci.net (166.48.234.9) [AS 3561] 28 msec 24 msec 24 msec 2 core1.NorthRoyalton.mci.net (204.70.4.205) [AS 3561] 24 msec 24 msec 28 msec 3 core-hssi-2.Chicago.mci.net (204.70.1.93) [AS 3561] 32 msec 28 msec 28 msec 4 border4-fddi-0.Chicago.mci.net (204.70.3.83) [AS 3561] 32 msec 32 msec 36 msec 5 data-research.Chicago.mci.net (204.70.27.10) [AS 3561] 36 msec 44 msec * 6 StLouis21-e0.dra.net (150.147.112.21) [AS 1746] 56 msec * 40 msec