North American Network Operators Group

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Re: selective prepends...one more time

  • From: Leo Bicknell
  • Date: Mon Sep 30 18:34:35 2002
  • Reply-by: Mon Oct 7 18:21:08 EDT 2002

In a message written on Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 12:16:07AM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> I think most customers don't know how this works. Maybe someone should
> write a book that explains this kind of stuff...

I'm not so sure I'd come to that conclusion.  I think when most
customers see a problem on their transit providers network they
would rather open up a ticket with their transit provider, and have
them solve the problem.

Most people I see using this feature fall into two catagories.
The first type doesn't believe the provider can fix the problem
but is forced to use them (due to price, management, whatever) and
uses this to avoid their NOC because it doesn't work.  The second
type of person believes they can actually do a better job of routing
than their upstream.  This may even be true in some cases (where
the customer has several transit providers all supporting this
'feature'), however I suspect in many cases the customer is actually
making their own life worse.

In general what this means is rather than having a couple of standard
route-map's/route-policies that get configured once and applied to
all peers you end up with a per-peer specific configuration.  It
would seem to me that the opportunity for mistakes is grealy
increased.  Even if we assume all the people using it really need
it, is it worth risking the performance of 500 or 1000 customers
for the 5-10 who actually use the features?

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - [email protected] - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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