On Thu, 26 Sep 1996 15:57:06 -0700 Vadim Antonov <avg@quake.net> alleged:

When i was at Sprint it was customary to ask customers to provide some assurance that routing information Sprint takes from them is going to stay sane. That was usually achieved by asking customers to send in their border configurations for review by SL engineering, and some formal criteria (like "no unfiltered IGP to BGP redistribution") was applied and said configuration had problems worked out before the actual peering was enabled.

Anyway, that automatically made every customer with BGP to go down SCA (Special Customer Arrangement) route. I think sales didn't like that, for whatever reason, and i saw several attempts to make BGP peering a regular sale during my tenure there. I guess they succeded after coming with some "guidelines", but without any understanding of the issues involved.

Somehow i became a big fan of Dilbert back then.

Vadim, When you were at Sprint, I was at Demon and we BGP peered with Sprint first using NetBSD/sparc IPX's with Morningstar PPP then using BSD/OS and RISCOM N2 cards. One thing that I remember is that your routers went insane _far_ more often that ours did. INSC were never much use and the only way we got things done was to cc: you and Sean in any reporting of faults. Nevertheless, both you and Sean where always very helpful. Cheers, Neil. -- Neil J. McRae. Alive and Kicking. E A S Y N E T G R O U P P L C neil@EASYNET.NET NetBSD/sparc: 100% SpF (Solaris protection Factor) Free the daemon in your <A HREF="http://www.NetBSD.ORG/">computer!</A>