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BGP Question - how do work around pigheaded ISPs

  • From: Roisman, Dani
  • Date: Fri Feb 09 22:39:56 2001

Hey there.  Due to the pigheadedness of a specific ISP (which I wil *not*
allude to in any way, shape, or form, so don't bother asking), and in the
interest of conserving IP addresses, I've been faced with quite a challenge.

- The Premis:
A parent organization has an unused /16 of address space, for arguments
sake, let's say it's 172.16.0.0/16.  It's out of the old "class B" address
range.  Two groups within the organization want to bring up independant
Internet datacenters, and need /18 of address space, each.  Since the parent
organization owns an unsed /16, the IP registry refuses to give the child
organizations any address space - they insist all address blocks assigned to
the parent organization be used, first.

ISPph (ph=pigheaded) has a BGP policy that filters out all routes in
128.0.0.0/2 longer than /16.

- The network:
One group has Internet connectivity to 2 Tier1 ISPs (ISPa and ISPb) in North
America.  They announce out 172.16.0.0/18 to both ISPs from AS65001.

The other group gets Internet connectivity to ISPc and ISPc in South
America.  They announce 172.16.64.0/18 to their ISPs from AS65002.

There is no private network connectivity or backbones between the 2
companies.

- The result:
ISPph blocks out the /18s at the peering connections to ISPa, ISPb, ISPc,
and ISPd.  So, customers of ISPph cannot see servers on AS65001 or AS65002.

- The workaround:
We announce  172.16.0.0/16 as well as 172.16.0.0/18 from AS65001 to ISPa and
ISPb.  In our preliminary testing, we've found that what happens is that
ISPph would route traffic to 172.16.64.0/18 to ISPa (or ISPb, but we'll
assume ISPa has a better connection to ISPph), because it learned the
172.16.0.0/16 route from there.  ISPa is hearing the *more specific* /18
from ISPc and ISPd, so it transits the traffic over to ISPc, which then
delivers it to the South American site.

- Questions:
1) is there a reason to announce the /16 from both ASs?  Is that "legal?"

2) under normal situations (assume no link failures) would this cause any
problem?  

3) Is there a link failure scenario that would cause the /16 to create a
blackhole for the 172.16.64.0/18 network?

4) Would you recommend this as a fix?

Of course, it would make ISPa transit for ISPph, but they're pigheaded
enough to make the Internet suck that way.

Thanks for your time!

----
Dani Roisman
[email protected]