Re: Arbitrary de-peering

* Patrick W. Gilmore · * Mon Jul 28 11:30:08 2008

On Jul 28, 2008, at 11:24 AM, William Waites wrote:

Le 08-07-28 à 17:12, [email protected] a écrit :
----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at
work in

March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in
Europe.

[...] York’s bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a
peering relationship

with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia [...] which was
the bandwidth

network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to
reach. [...]

Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and
the loss of

connectivity. Unreachability due to arbitrariness in network
peering is unacceptable.

There must be more to this story. If Cogent de-peered from Telia the
traffic would

normally just have taken another path.

One should check one's assumptions before posting to 10K+ of their not-
so-close friends.
Neither network has transit. What other path is there to take?
Once you answer that, I'll read the rest of your e-mail.
--
TTFN,
patrick
Either there was a configuration error of some

sort or else some sort of proactive black-holing on one side or the
other. As the

latter would be surprising and very heavy handed, I would tend to
suspect the former.
Peering relationships are made and severed all the time with no
particular ill-effects,

unless you can point to examples of outright malice (i.e. of the
black-holing kind) I

don't think there is much basis for any public policy decisions in
this example.
Unreachability due to configuation error is of course relatively
common; perhaps I am

wrong, but I don't think the CRTC would really have much to say
about that.
Cheers,
-w