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Re: PC Routers (was Re: /24s run amuck)

  • From: Alexei Roudnev
  • Date: Thu Jan 15 02:27:00 2004 
There is one more interesting problem.

Let's, say, you install PC with ZEBRA and have all 120,000 prefixes.
Internet is _internet_, sometimes people make a crazy things,
and create a bad (misconfigured, or very long, or very unusual) announces.
Some announces are fatal for Cisco IOS, some for Zebra, some for WellFleet
(do someone remember it? Very big competitor -:)).

Now, say, announce A crash Cisco IOS. 99.9% Internet backbones are Ciscos,
so this announce breaks few Ciscos around and die - so you never know about
it (and will not have a chance to be happy that _this announce crash Ciscos
but do not crash ZEBRA). Not bad, of course - you are alive, all Internet is
alive.

Now, say, announce B crash ZEBRA (and do not crash Cisco). It will spread
until it reach first ZEBRA on it;'s road - _your_ ZEBRA. So all Zerbras in
Internet crash at once (and you are unhappy).

It is not a joke - we had such scenario few years ago (it was 'gated vs
Cisco and WellFreet vs Cisco'). And such scenario make Juniper back-bone a
little dangerous (but I believe that JUNIPER debugged such problems long
ago, so it is not a case today).