North American Network Operators Group

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RE: multi-homing fixed

  • From: Howard C. Berkowitz
  • Date: Tue Aug 28 12:11:06 2001


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