On Tue, Jul 16, 2019 at 3:33 PM Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:
More like do whatever you want in your own house as long as you don't infringe upon others.
That's where the rub is; when using "BGP optimisers" to influence public Internet routing, you cannot guarantee you won't infringe upon others.
The argument against route optimizers (assuming appropriate ingress\egress filters) is a religious one and should be treated as such.
The argument against "BGP optimizers" is that we *cannot* assume appropriate ingress or egress filters. It appears to me like fallacy to suggest a line of reasoning ala "if you do things correctly, things won't go wrong". Clearly we've observed many times over that things *do* go wrong. Some examples: almost every year one of the major BGP vendors has a serious bug related to the functionality to NO_EXPORT in some release. Also, routinely we observe there are software defects that cause a device to behave different (read 'leak') than how the operator had explicitly configured the device. These are facts, not religious statements. Perhaps in a bug-free world there is room for dangerous activities, but there is no such thing as bug-free. And I haven't even covered the human error angle. We must robustly architect our networks to mitigate or dampen the negative effects of issues at all layers of the stack. I consider it wholly inappropriate to write-off the countless hours spend dealing with fallout from "BGP optimizers" and the significant financial damages we've sustained as "religious arguments". Kind regards, Job