Re: Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations
What's been bothering me is that Sprint is filtering at /19 in 206/8 but just allocated me a /21 out of 206/8. Since my largest customer is leaning on me to multi-home, and since I view Sprint's filtering as indicative of what others are likely to do RSN, I begged Sprint to allocate a block the size of the smallest block they would route if I had gotten it from another NSP.
Is it unfair to ask Sprint to make allocations based on its own filtering policies?
When I multihome and Pennsauken is down, will Sprint's filtering cut me off from access to other Sprint customers via my alternative path?
Ah, a reason why Sprint's filters are self-defeating. You would be better off leaving sprint now, and going to a different provider. Use a /21 out of another provider's CIDR block. If at a later date you decide to multi-home with sprint, sprint's filters only effect small inbound blocks. Sprint is more than happy to spew little blocks (so much for 'saving the global Internet'). I've hear of a lot of crazy ideas from other NSP's, but not a peep of any other NSP following Sprint's lead on filtering. But suppose other NSP's did decide to start filtering in the future, that's another reason to get your own CIDR blocks from the InterNIC ASAP. If you hadn't waited this long, you could have gotten a block in 192/8 - 205/8, and wouldn't have to worry about Sprint's filtering in 206/8. Yes, it is perverse that the people most harmed are those that patiently follow the 'rules.' It is unfortunate that the IANA and NIC policies seem to be creating a system that encourages people to jump to the front of the line. But folks, there seems to be nothing to gain, and a lot to lose by being a good net citizen. You don't get any brownie points for being a nice guy. You just get ignored. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation
Sean Donelan writes:
Ah, a reason why Sprint's filters are self-defeating. You would be better off leaving sprint now, and going to a different provider.
Sean, Were it not for Sprint, I wouldn't exist. When I was starting out I had never even seen a cisco (although I'd been shoving tcp/ip through them for a dozen years). I had no idea where to buy one or how to configure it. Sprint not only told me what I needed, they sold it to me at a good price. They configured it for me. My first lesson in cisco configuration was by telephone at 4 am one morning from a Sprint engineer, while we waited for techs to do something with my line. (I had one of the oddest set of qualifications and non-qualifications around. I had co-founded the GE corporate tcp/ip network in 1983, but I was in R&D, and we'd handed that off to MIS. I had run a LAN segment of 30 or so assorted unix boxes for a dozen years, but I'd never configured a router more complicated than a Sun with two enet ports. I was an applications type - distributed OS's and the like.) When I was a 56k site with 8 dialup lines in my home, and some people were trying to extract $10K/yr to pay for a CIX router that almost none of my packets ever came near, Sprint stood with me and the other tiny providers. (Selling dialup was then a side business generating less than $10K gross revenue the first year.) Thanks in part to Sprint, that side business has grown into a network of four POPs bringing the Internet to NY State's Adirondack region. There's no fortune to be made here, but there's a living in it. It's what I wanted to do, and I couldn't have done it without Sprint. Sean Doran's recent posting about how the Sprints aren't out to squash us little guys but in fact are dependent on us was remarkably like the way I used to explain Sprint's position during the CIX filtering war in summer of '94. In fact, I think he stole those ideas from me :) Sprint is big, and they're busy, and it can be damnably hard to get their attention (hence my posting), but I'm here because they helped me when I needed help and backed me politically and operationally when I needed backing. Out here in the woods, things like that still matter. I think there are other solutions to my problem. I personally don't even want to multihome ... my private line to Sprint has never gone down, so I'm effectively part of Sprint's network, and last time I checked, Sprint was multi-homed. My colocated customer is sitting on Sprint's network ... what more can they want? Me practicing BGP on them? Unfortunately, *their* major customer had its weekend trade show a week ago when a big fiber cut isolated the show from my customer's server all day. Since the company had gone public the Thursday before and had bet its farm (and a lot of other peoples') on good press from the trade show, things were kind of tense, and my customer is in no mood to be told how they're already multi-homed. -- Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY stpeters@NetHeaven.com Owner/operator, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/1-800-910-6671 Internet for Albany/Saratoga, Glens Falls, North Creek, & Lake Placid Visit the Internet Conference Calendar http://calendar.com/conferences
On Mon, 29 Jan 1996, Dick St.Peters wrote:
Unfortunately, *their* major customer had its weekend trade show a week ago when a big fiber cut isolated the show from my customer's server all day. Since the company had gone public the Thursday before and had bet its farm (and a lot of other peoples') on good press from the trade show, things were kind of tense, and my customer is in no mood to be told how they're already multi-homed.
In fact, multi-homing is entirely irrelevant here from a technical point of view. From a business point of view "multi-homing" may have some value, but technically it is worthless, *UNLESS* it provides topological diversity. Of course that's what everyone *EXPECTS* to get from multihoming but not that many people closely examine it from an engineering point of view to see if they are really getting what they expect. It starts at home. Are you going out two separate demarcs? Down two different streets? Through two different local exchange buildings? And then on the regional level, are both your providers renting bandwidth on the same inter-city fibre bundle? Seems to me that all of this physical topology nitty-gritty needs to be dealt with openly, at least with ISP customers, and it seems to me that it is relevant to any Quality-Of-Service metrics that IETF WG's look at. Remember, TCP/IP networks were *INTENDED* to be able to continue operations in the event of a war. The software is certainly capable of this but the physical topology leaves something to be desired. Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com
participants (3)
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Dick St.Peters -
Michael Dillon -
Sean Donelan