Several of you responded earlier today with information that was helpful in resolving the problem of a bad route to one of our networks being propagated.
So, collected gurus of the net, how do we keep this from happening again?
Its called MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction. Even if we discount deliberate sabotoge, mistakes happen. By their nature, mistakes by large providers are more spectacular. But the reality is providers of all sizes are one typo away from the dreaded routing blackhole. People can use things like route registeries to match and filter routes against the registered information. It doesn't really solve the problem, just moves it to a different place. People can still register annoying route objects, i.e. the universal default route, and trash connectivity for hours. Its tough to tie particular networks back to valid AS origins since they are allocated/assigned independently. Worse, if a provider doesn't tell the rest of us what the valid network/AS combinations are, how will we ever know when someone announces an invalid network/AS combination. He who lives by the ANY will one day die by the ANY. I guess that is what the telephone is for. But when someone blackholes 198.41.0, I hope you have the phone numbers memorized. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation