On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
How do we hinder this in the short term? I know there are a lot of long term solutions that very few is implementing, but would the fact that these mistakes are brought up into the (lime)light by a public shaming list make ISPs shape up and perform less mistakes?
My thoughts on the prefix filtering issue would be that we need some kind of system that works along the same principles as DNSSEC and SPF, ie a holder of IP space can publish that they would like everybody to filter in a certain way for announcements for that perticular prefix, and then the other end can do so if they want to. This needs to be automatic and quick, ie a change in RADB policy should be reflected in the real world in minutes (preferrably) or hours (more realistically perhaps) and not in days or months. This might already be in place, I don't know other than RIPE, but in RIPE you can register a route object with a certain IP space, and IP space can have multiple route objects. The thing here is that to implement this policy in IOS creates *huge* rulesets that are really cumbersome and cluttery. Also, people tend not to rebuild these very often, so for customer routes, doing a handover between ISPs when moving PI space might involve outages and days of limited connectivity. Also, change of policy doesn't isn't reflected unless a route is cleared (soft though) which involves re-hashing a lot of routes very often if filters are updated often. I also think that the information in RADB doesn't really contain everything I would need in it, so it might need to be extended, but this is easier than getting a new framework into our routers (routing policy server?) that might work in near realtime. Is there work being done that could realistically be implemented anytime soon? Does benefit outweigh the potential catastrophies that might happen when rolling out and running such a system? Perhaps it's too late for IPv4 in this aspect, but it might be feasable for IPv6? Fewer prefixes and (hopefully) no break-outs, would mean PA blocks could be filtered hard, and if larger ISPs do hard filtering based on RADB, ISPs getting into IPv6 would need to get their prefixes properly registered there before getting IPv6 working to any extent. Anyhow, as people are continuing to use null routes to enforce regulatory demands (likely cause for the latest outages) this problem will most likely escalate. This would also help with <http://eng.5ninesdata.com/~tkapela/iphd-2.ppt> problem I guess. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se