On Mar 3, 1997, Erik Sherk wrote:
Sean has a good point here. A flap of a /8 is the same as a flap of a /24 from a computational point of view. There is clearly some social engineering going on here. If you want your long prefix to be golbally visable and you allow it to flap, then you will be subject to dampening. On the other hand if you renumber into a larger aggregate, then you are protected from dampening (to a greater degree). Kind of a 'carrot and stick' approch. :-)
Computational power required for a route flap is not the issue here. Many people have stated that, statistically longer prefixes flap more. Unfortunately, they have then said that because of this shorter prefixes should have looser dampening parameters put on them, when what they really meant was that the longer prefixes should have more strict dampening parameters put on them. Yes it is exactly the same thing, but it is an important semantic distinction. If a group of prefixes categorized by a its length tends to flap more than the average, then said group should have more strict dampening parameters placed on it. Alec -- +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+ |Alec Peterson - ahp@hilander.com | Erols Internet Services, INC. | |Network Engineer | Springfield, VA. | +------------------------------------+--------------------------------------+