Sean, you male chauvinist pig. ;-) Actually, the following is a general rant, and not aimed at Sean. A BGP route seems to take approximately 155 bytes (based on "show ip route summary" on a convenient GSR; YMMV). So a singe BGP route, at $1000 per 128 meg (that is, at the absurd markup a vendor might charge), you're looking 1/8 of a cent per route per router. That doesn't count memory for a separate forwarding table; still, we're not talking about a billable amount per router. Now, if I am a service provider of any scale, and I do not accept your specific announcements, I run the risk of taking a sub-optimal path to you. There are lots of acceptable reasons for this to be. What if you are transitioning from provider X to provider Y, and have been given 60 days to renumber? Should you renumber on Transition Day and suffer the effects of waiting for nameservice? Or if you do mistrust your provider, or find it cheaper to connect to two smaller tier-3ish providers than one tier-1ish to get the same distance from the sites you need to reach? As a provider, I want to be able to offer the best connectivity to my customers, and even a little courtesy to the dear departed. I want to provide, and respect other people's provision of, these services. If you're not providing these services to people, then sure, filter your BGP announcements. On the other hand, if you're not providing these services, and you're not multihomed (and unless you have a /19 or so, part of the problem, in which case you have no place to bitch), what the heck do you need the table for? Assuming you're a good Internet player who has no need to be kind to your fellow providers, filter and dampen and save your time and memory. Heck, even if you are being kind, dampen; there's no reason to let a madly flapping network give your iBGP mesh a heart attack. But a stable route providing intelligent path selection to a network your customers may need to reach, or time for a site to renumber without any loss of connectivity? For an eight of a cent? I mean, come on. -Dave On 8/28/2001 at 08:41:40 -0700, Sean M. Doran said:

"David Schwartz" <davids@webmaster.com> writes:

| I'm not sure I believe that this tragedy of the commons exists where people | route on allocation boundaries. If I make Sprint carry an extra route just | for my little network, that helps all Sprint customers reach my little | network.

Cool, so you can get them to contribute a fraction of the 50 cents you owe me?

Since I live downstream from Sprint, I tell you what: I'll give you the first flap for free. And that's a generous offer, given that your little network represents approximately zero percent of my traffic, and I doubt I'll be complaining to my other personalities that I can't get at your fascinating content without subsidizing your network's globally-visible dynamicism.

Sean. (who does, incidentally, subscribe to some pay-for-play web sites, for example, which helps them pay for a part of THEIR dynamicism. i must remember to ask for a 50 cent * n discount at renewal time...)

P.S.: the point here, since it's easy to miss, is that a clearing house function is useful for containing complexity of negotiation, and is currently being done by the RIRs on behalf of their owners

business opportunity: a tool which reliably lets one decide if prefix x is worth carrying in all its flapping glory, or whether it should be bitbucketed until a bill is paid

-- Dave Israel Senior Manager, IP Backbone Intermedia Business Internet