North American Network Operators Group

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Re: scope of the 69/8 problem

  • From: bdragon
  • Date: Wed Mar 19 14:42:05 2003

This discussion falls into a pattern we've seen before:

1) Operators doing the right thing experience a problem created by
operators doing the wrong thing.
2) It is not possible to isolate the pain to only the operators
doing the wrong thing.
3) The only way to solve the problem is to raise the level of pain across
the board so as to force those ultimately causeing the pain to
self-marginalize.
4) No one is willing to accept any pain they don't absolutely _have_ to
even if it would save them pain in the future
5) Therefore the islands of pain remain indefinately, but as long as
I'm not affected, I don't care.

The above can be applied to:
1) filtering of 69/8
2) excessive deaggregation of routes
3) RPF
4) Use of RFC1918 in ways which violate RFC1918 (packets crossing
enterprise boundaries)
5) Actually using .0 and .255 for networks with masks which allow
this.
6) IPv6
7) Multicast
8) etc

To bring back around to the issue of 69/8, yes, the only way to
solve the problem is to bring a set of "important" things into that
network. No one who controls any "important" thing would actually
do such a thing. So those folks in 69/8 will likely go out of business,
or find ways around their problem which will likely involve other
"bad operator" activity, continuing to advance our problems indefinately
and in new and interesting ways.