On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
the point of 2xDS3 was specifically to get major services, and not to get every basement dual-homer.
Please explain why the "basement dual-homer" should not have the same right to diversity as the "major services."
And please, be specific.
That is easy. She is not: One of the old crowd. One of the power elite. She is probably: Trying to provide a service, which if successful would threaten the sit-on- their-ass crowd. Too young to have been around when what matters happened--the gathering up of tons of address-space at no cost to the gatherers.
Oh, come on. I've never known Randy to discriminate on "old crowd" or "power elite". A bad business plan or delusions of grandeur is another thing. The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan. Better to buy from someone with a clue, with a real (redundant path) backbone, and provision as many lines as you want into disparate POPs. Even better, get out of the basment where you're dealing with an ILEC for your last mile. Most small business parks have redundant paths these days. Get your address space from the provider and worry about your business, not your connectivity. Good (at least better) plan. It's been a long time since a major provider took out their whole net, or even a geographic region. Dave, speaking for myself
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Larry Sheldon Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 6:45 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: multi-homing fixed
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
the point of 2xDS3 was specifically to get major services,
and not to get
every basement dual-homer.
Please explain why the "basement dual-homer" should not have the same right to diversity as the "major services."
And please, be specific.
That is easy.
She is not:
One of the old crowd.
One of the power elite.
She is probably:
Trying to provide a service, which if successful would threaten the sit-on- their-ass crowd.
Too young to have been around when what matters happened--the gathering up of tons of address-space at no cost to the gatherers.
On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 10:45:59AM -0400, David Hares wrote:
Better to buy from someone with a clue, with a real (redundant path) backbone, and provision as many lines as you want into disparate POPs. Even
I've asked this of a number of people now, but how many providers have multiple POP's in a city that are _completely redundant_? That is, they can operate _fully_ with one POP out of service? In New York, Washington DC, Chicago, the bay area and maybe one or two other spots you most likely have a half dozen choices. In many other NFL cities, say Green Bay, Tampa, Cincinatti, Indianapolis and the like if you have more than one choice I'd be surprised, and in several if you even have one choice I'd be surprised. Even if they have two pops, many of those cities won't have redundant long haul capacity. One POP will either be behind the other, or they are oversubscribed on the long haul. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
True enough. But you don't really need multiple POPs in a city. Frame Relay and ATM are both distance insensative, pricewise. Most, if not all, of the serious players have discounts off list from various providers so it's reasonable to provision one or more circuits well out of the local area. Deals can usually be worked for dedicated facilites too.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Leo Bicknell Sent: Tuesday, August 28, 2001 11:09 AM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: multi-homing fixed
On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 10:45:59AM -0400, David Hares wrote:
Better to buy from someone with a clue, with a real (redundant path) backbone, and provision as many lines as you want into disparate POPs. Even
I've asked this of a number of people now, but how many providers have multiple POP's in a city that are _completely redundant_? That is, they can operate _fully_ with one POP out of service?
In New York, Washington DC, Chicago, the bay area and maybe one or two other spots you most likely have a half dozen choices. In many other NFL cities, say Green Bay, Tampa, Cincinatti, Indianapolis and the like if you have more than one choice I'd be surprised, and in several if you even have one choice I'd be surprised. Even if they have two pops, many of those cities won't have redundant long haul capacity. One POP will either be behind the other, or they are oversubscribed on the long haul.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, David Hares wrote:
True enough. But you don't really need multiple POPs in a city. Frame Relay and ATM are both distance insensative, pricewise. Most, if not all, of the serious players have discounts off list from various providers so it's reasonable to provision one or more circuits well out of the local area. Deals can usually be worked for dedicated facilites too.
Hmm...we usually get hit with extra charges for crossing lata boundaries. I wouldn't say Frame is entirely distance insensative. Besides, even if a little guy in Gainesville, FL does get Frame to say UUNet in Miami and Jacksonville, this'll take care of when one of your circuits goes out and UUNet or Bell can't figure out what happened for 12 hours, but it totally ignores the fact that at times (often for extended times) peering connections between various Tier-1's suck. I remember at least one time for several weeks when crossing between UUNet and Sprint meant >1000ms response times. Redundancy is only one reason to multihome. More paths (hopefully at least one per destination that doesn't suck) is another big one, and you're not going to get this benefit from adding N circuits to one "big clued-in provider"...though you might get it from a medium sized regional provider that buys transit and doesn't have overloaded peering connections. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001 00:05:58 EDT, jlewis@lewis.org said:
Redundancy is only one reason to multihome. More paths (hopefully at least one per destination that doesn't suck) is another big one, and
We had some truly sucking paths to some destinations yesterday (15000ms over our OC-3) until our chief NOC monkey said enough was enough and nuked the BGP session with the other end. Happen to have any pointers to "this path sucks no matter what BGP says" tools? Especially for the case of the *real* problem being 2 or 3 AS's down the chain? Or does everybody's noc monkeys wait for the "foobar.com sucks" phone calls? Valdis Kletnieks Operating Systems Analyst Virginia Tech
how many providers have multiple POP's in a city that are _completely redundant_? That is, they can operate _fully_ with one POP out of service?
none can operate *fully*, as a customer access line pretty much has to terminate in a single router which can, and eventually will, fail. but, most large providers have more than one pop in the largest cities, bay area, nyc, dee cee, etc. and those pops are redundantly and diversely wired. if not, don't buy from them. life can be simple. of course, in toledo, you're probably sol. randy
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
how many providers have multiple POP's in a city that are _completely redundant_? That is, they can operate _fully_ with one POP out of service?
none can operate *fully*, as a customer access line pretty much has to terminate in a single router which can, and eventually will, fail.
but, most large providers have more than one pop in the largest cities, bay area, nyc, dee cee, etc. and those pops are redundantly and diversely wired. if not, don't buy from them. life can be simple.
So we don't want to force networks in the default-free zone to buy bigger routers with more memory, but it's ok to force them to essentially build a second network by having redundant pops in every city? I'm sure the router vendors and colo builders would love this idea, but I don't think throwing hardware at the problem will help in the long run. Iljitsch van Beijnum
--On Wednesday, 29 August, 2001 8:32 PM +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com> wrote:
So we don't want to force networks in the default-free zone to buy bigger routers with more memory, but it's ok to force them to essentially build a second network by having redundant pops in every city?
Noone is forcing anyone to do anything. Providers have a simple financial incentive to build redundant network - customers pay more for connections with higher availability and diversity. There is currently little financial incentive for carrier's to carry other people's microallocated / 'TE' routes, as /many/ of these do not materially affect goodput, and/or are goodput to destinations less interesting than the cost they incur. If I could think of a good way to measure usefulness of a prefix [1], I'd bet that the (positive) corelation between it, and number of IP's in that prefix is declining, but I bet small prefixes are still considerably less useful than large ones, but cost the same. [1] measuring traffic to/from prefixes against prefix size (i.e. 2^(32-len)), as a % of total traffic, and plotting these over time, would make an interesting research study. Perhaps someone working in a research department at a major backbone already has some stats they could do something similar with. Alex Bligh Personal Capacity
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Alex Bligh wrote:
Noone is forcing anyone to do anything. Providers have a simple financial incentive to build redundant network - customers pay more for connections with higher availability and diversity. There is currently little financial incentive for carrier's to carry other people's microallocated / 'TE' routes, as /many/ of these do not materially affect goodput, and/or are goodput to destinations less interesting than the cost they incur.
Interesting assertion. Here's why I think it's wrong: Providers have an incentive to make money. Anyone disagree? As time has shown, the majority of providers will announce prefixes longer than a /20 for a customer if they request it, although they are quick to state that they do not guarantee global routability. Providers have relationships with other providers. Sometimes these relationships take the form of cost-free peering. In others there is an exchange of money. In the former case, it would seem that if provider A wants the routes they are announcing to be seen by provider B and vice-versa in the interest of providing arguably better reachability for their customers, they agree to accept each others routes. Better reachability for customers = happier customers = more revenue. In the second case since direct consideration exists and a provider is in fact incentivized to make money, they largely will accept the routes. This is not theory, it's what exists today. There are of course the few exceptions to the rule that argue voiceferously against the practice, but they are in fact fighting revenue and for better or worse the bean counters usually win those arguments in the long run.
The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan.
I do not think anyone (Randy included) is questioning the right of basement-dwellers to multihome (by my previous definition). I think what is being questioned by many and various is (a) their right to do it at other people's expense, without reimbursement (b) whether the (non-reimbursed) cost to the community is greater than the (non-paid for) gain to the community. (c) whether there are other technologies which cost less in total, and/or attribute cost more directly to those who benefit from it. (d) whether in an effort to achieve multihoming, they are selecting the technology which costs them the least, or costs the community the least. Whilst there is no current mechanism to reliably achieve (a) (beyond Roeland kindly offering to pay for Sean's routers), direct market forces fail, so, like with so many other problems, the internet community has come up with hueristic mechanisms to enforce (b) i.e. 'your reachability information is only worth the cost of my carrying it if it contains announcements shorter than a /nn, and I will rely on RIR's to demonstrate that there is a fair correlation between assigment size (and thus prefix length) and usefulness of the prefix to me. If all this sounds a bit "matter of opinion", type stuff, which will never get resolved, well, yes it is, and thus just the right sort of stuff for a flamewar on NANOG. Great, just so long as elsewhere, people are thinking about (c). And then we can have the adoption flamewar (d) on NANOG afterwards. -- Alex Bligh Personal Capacity
Having just had my DSL go down yet AGAIN (a more or less daily occurrence), I'm inclined to chip in under my telecommuter hat. Yes, I know the best way is to convince my boss to pay for frac T1/frame access with dial backup. Working on that. In the meantime, I have DSL from CAIS, with Covad as the CLEC. Covad is in Chapter 11. I've also ordered @home cable to come in for next week, and I'm trying to scrounge a multiple-Ethernet router to set up alternate connectivity. (Note that I work for a router vendor, so I can't go and do something as simple as mail-order a router). @home doesn't seem to be in much better financial shape. At 4:28 PM +0100 8/28/01, Alex Bligh wrote:
The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan.
I do not think anyone (Randy included) is questioning the right of basement-dwellers to multihome (by my previous definition). I think what is being questioned by many and various is (a) their right to do it at other people's expense, without reimbursement (b) whether the (non-reimbursed) cost to the community is greater than the (non-paid for) gain to the community. (c) whether there are other technologies which cost less in total, and/or attribute cost more directly to those who benefit from it. (d) whether in an effort to achieve multihoming, they are selecting the technology which costs them the least, or costs the community the least.
What I'd like to see, as a short-term fix, is to have two local providers each agree to have a multihomed block within their allocations, and both to propagate this block to the DFZ and each other. Microallocations would come out of it; the microallocations would not be advertised between the two carriers. Certainly, there would be failure modes in which the microallocation might go down for one provider, but I'd be in better shape. I'd ideally pick local carriers with different kinds of physical connectivity. While I'm perfectly capable of running BGP with both carriers, I recognize that skill would be rare in the basement market, and I can't reasonably expect it. But I am getting truly sick of dial backup on a per-host basis. *thank you -- this may have been more venting steam than anything else **
Whilst there is no current mechanism to reliably achieve (a) (beyond Roeland kindly offering to pay for Sean's routers), direct market forces fail, so, like with so many other problems, the internet community has come up with hueristic mechanisms to enforce (b) i.e. 'your reachability information is only worth the cost of my carrying it if it contains announcements shorter than a /nn, and I will rely on RIR's to demonstrate that there is a fair correlation between assigment size (and thus prefix length) and usefulness of the prefix to me.
If all this sounds a bit "matter of opinion", type stuff, which will never get resolved, well, yes it is, and thus just the right sort of stuff for a flamewar on NANOG.
Great, just so long as elsewhere, people are thinking about (c). And then we can have the adoption flamewar (d) on NANOG afterwards.
-- Alex Bligh Personal Capacity
Well it looks like we have come full circle. www is born. ISP numbers increase like rabbits in australia (I even start one) a lot of $$ is invested in XLEC Market tanks XLEC, ISPs, .. file chapter 11 at the end of the day you can even get a dissent Internet connection from a single provider. This could be the right theme for the next Nanog T-shirt. ak "Howard C. Berkowitz" wrote:
Having just had my DSL go down yet AGAIN (a more or less daily occurrence), I'm inclined to chip in under my telecommuter hat. Yes, I know the best way is to convince my boss to pay for frac T1/frame access with dial backup. Working on that.
In the meantime, I have DSL from CAIS, with Covad as the CLEC. Covad is in Chapter 11. I've also ordered @home cable to come in for next week, and I'm trying to scrounge a multiple-Ethernet router to set up alternate connectivity. (Note that I work for a router vendor, so I can't go and do something as simple as mail-order a router). @home doesn't seem to be in much better financial shape.
At 4:28 PM +0100 8/28/01, Alex Bligh wrote:
The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan.
I do not think anyone (Randy included) is questioning the right of basement-dwellers to multihome (by my previous definition). I think what is being questioned by many and various is (a) their right to do it at other people's expense, without reimbursement (b) whether the (non-reimbursed) cost to the community is greater than the (non-paid for) gain to the community. (c) whether there are other technologies which cost less in total, and/or attribute cost more directly to those who benefit from it. (d) whether in an effort to achieve multihoming, they are selecting the technology which costs them the least, or costs the community the least.
What I'd like to see, as a short-term fix, is to have two local providers each agree to have a multihomed block within their allocations, and both to propagate this block to the DFZ and each other. Microallocations would come out of it; the microallocations would not be advertised between the two carriers. Certainly, there would be failure modes in which the microallocation might go down for one provider, but I'd be in better shape. I'd ideally pick local carriers with different kinds of physical connectivity.
While I'm perfectly capable of running BGP with both carriers, I recognize that skill would be rare in the basement market, and I can't reasonably expect it. But I am getting truly sick of dial backup on a per-host basis.
*thank you -- this may have been more venting steam than anything else **
Whilst there is no current mechanism to reliably achieve (a) (beyond Roeland kindly offering to pay for Sean's routers), direct market forces fail, so, like with so many other problems, the internet community has come up with hueristic mechanisms to enforce (b) i.e. 'your reachability information is only worth the cost of my carrying it if it contains announcements shorter than a /nn, and I will rely on RIR's to demonstrate that there is a fair correlation between assigment size (and thus prefix length) and usefulness of the prefix to me.
If all this sounds a bit "matter of opinion", type stuff, which will never get resolved, well, yes it is, and thus just the right sort of stuff for a flamewar on NANOG.
Great, just so long as elsewhere, people are thinking about (c). And then we can have the adoption flamewar (d) on NANOG afterwards.
-- Alex Bligh Personal Capacity
Did you see where Excite@home is in bad financial shape and expected to run out of cash within months. Roy "Howard C. Berkowitz" wrote:
...
In the meantime, I have DSL from CAIS, with Covad as the CLEC. Covad is in Chapter 11. I've also ordered @home cable to come in for next week, and I'm trying to scrounge a multiple-Ethernet router to set up alternate connectivity. (Note that I work for a router vendor, so I can't go and do something as simple as mail-order a router). @home doesn't seem to be in much better financial shape.
...
Did you see where Excite@home is in bad financial shape and expected to run out of cash within months.
Roy
Yep. And Verizon, the ILEC, doesn't seem to understand the concept of needing a subnet -- their xDSL is host-only (I have stories about that). And trying to call some of the more established ISPs (Verio, UUnet, etc.) to get a quote on frac T1 or FR access gets a salesdroid that doesn't seem to listen to what I am saying. Among other things, that proposing a Cisco router to a Nortel employee probably isn't the best strategy. That I really am not interested in web services. That I want to know about service response times (SLAs being too much to expect). Ironically, I have far more experience with Cisco gear than Nortel, since I'm in advanced technology and don't work daily with the current products. But then the Ciscos proposed are far more expensive than models that would do the job perfectly well.
"Howard C. Berkowitz" wrote:
...
In the meantime, I have DSL from CAIS, with Covad as the CLEC. Covad is in Chapter 11. I've also ordered @home cable to come in for next week, and I'm trying to scrounge a multiple-Ethernet router to set up alternate connectivity. (Note that I work for a router vendor, so I can't go and do something as simple as mail-order a router). @home doesn't seem to be in much better financial shape.
...
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Howard C. Berkowitz wrote:
Did you see where Excite@home is in bad financial shape and expected to run out of cash within months.
Roy
Yep. And Verizon, the ILEC, doesn't seem to understand the concept of needing a subnet -- their xDSL is host-only (I have stories about that).
FWIW: You can get a DSL provisioned through Verizon DSLAMs via many different ISPs (they vary per LATA). Many of them (cough) offer business-class services (subnets, VPN/IPSEC). Chain goes like this: (In most states, example given in VZ and SBC area) ILEC (Verizon/SBC) sells physical copper lines to DILEC (VADI/ADI) who provides "Layer 2" service to ILEC's ISP (Verizon Online DSL) Many other ISPs. Legally (again, in most states), DLEC arm of ILEC is not allowed to provide layer 3 service, and is obligated to sell the service to all ISPs including ILEC-affiliated ISP on equal terms. -- Alex Pilosov | http://www.acedsl.com/home.html CTO - Acecape, Inc. | AceDSL:The best ADSL in the world 325 W 38 St. Suite 1005 | (Stealth Marketing Works! :) New York, NY 10018 |
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Alex Pilosov wrote:
FWIW: You can get a DSL provisioned through Verizon DSLAMs via many different ISPs (they vary per LATA). Many of them (cough) offer business-class services (subnets, VPN/IPSEC).
Until Verizon pulls an SBC on you and forces all your clients to connect through a "broadband gateway" that lets them sell other services directly to YOUR customer through that pipe... See http://www.cispa.org/forum-dsl-news.html and http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/stories/news/0,4164,2787113,00.html Charles
Chain goes like this: (In most states, example given in VZ and SBC area) ILEC (Verizon/SBC) sells physical copper lines to DILEC (VADI/ADI) who provides "Layer 2" service to ILEC's ISP (Verizon Online DSL) Many other ISPs.
Legally (again, in most states), DLEC arm of ILEC is not allowed to provide layer 3 service, and is obligated to sell the service to all ISPs including ILEC-affiliated ISP on equal terms.
-- Alex Pilosov | http://www.acedsl.com/home.html CTO - Acecape, Inc. | AceDSL:The best ADSL in the world 325 W 38 St. Suite 1005 | (Stealth Marketing Works! :) New York, NY 10018 |
On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Alex Bligh wrote:
I think what is being questioned by many and various is ...
(c) whether there are other technologies which cost less in total, and/or attribute cost more directly to those who benefit from it.
Much of the other discussion on this topic seems to assume that effective multihoming means that you have a prefix which is in every BGP route table throughout the Internet. This is simply not required. There are degrees of multihoming. Let me chime in with one: A modest operation which requires multihoming can select two providers according who meet the following criteria: 1) Connectivity to each provider is available and cost-effective 2) The two providers meet somewhere else 3) Both providers agree to provide you with address space 4) Both providers agree to let you announce your allocation 5) Both providers agree to specifics from you and from each other The rest of the world can filter your specifics and you still have very good redundancy. If you think through the realistic failure modes, they are few and manageable. (That includes telecom failures, network congestion, BGP failures, business failures.) The rest of the world (which you are not paying) is free to listen to your specifics if their infrastructure can handle the routes, or to filter them to protect the stability of their networks. Your reliability and connectivity will not be fundamentally threatened. -Steve Dashbit - The Leader In Internet Topology www.dashbit.com www.traceloop.com
The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan.
what is interestingly bad about this plan is that it attempts to save the basement-dweller money at the expense of everyone else. and that's the point of the filtering story. randy
On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Randy Bush wrote:
The real problem with most basement multi-homers is they go with the cheapest local service they can get, often from someone clueless with one POP / one path. To fix this, they add another cheap, local, clueless service and pray they don't get clueless at the same time. Then they inflict bad judgement on the rest of the Internet by demanding their routes be distributed. Bad plan.
what is interestingly bad about this plan is that it attempts to save the basement-dweller money at the expense of everyone else. and that's the point of the filtering story.
Judging strictly from the present economic climate, a lot of dotcoms that went all out in style aren't around anymore, or are on the brink of bankruptcy, while many of those despised basement dwellers managed to prosper, or at least remain solvent in these hard times. So nothing like a bit of convenient protectionist filtering to keep the competition down... --Mitch NetSide
participants (16)
-
Alex Bligh -
Alex Pilosov -
arman khalili -
Charles Sprickman -
David Hares -
Howard C. Berkowitz -
Iljitsch van Beijnum -
jlewis＠lewis.org -
Larry Sheldon -
Leo Bicknell -
Mitch Halmu -
Patrick Greenwell -
Randy Bush -
Roy -
Steve Schaefer -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu