NANOG 34 Agenda

Knowledge of the amount of traffic between source and destination pairs of a network is crucial to fundamental operational tasks such as capacity planning, traffic engineering, and peering management. Router vendors, third parties, academic researchers, and ingenious network engineers have devised multiple ways of collecting and estimating traffic matrices. This session presents an overview of applications of traffic matrices and operational experiences with the various approaches, including Netflow-based methods, mathematical estimation models, and MPLS (both RSVP and LDP) methods. Emphasis will be on practical experiences with each method.

This tutorial introduces service providers to some more advanced BGP features and techniques to aid with operating their networks within the Internet. After a recap of iBGP, eBGP and common attributes, the tutorial will look at the various scaling techniques available, when to use BGP instead of an IGP, and examine policy options available through the use of local preference, MED and communities. The tutorial then looks at common deployment scenarios as used in ISP networks, before finishing off with some of the newer features available.

This talk provides an overview of VoIP for operators that covers some of the issues and challenges confronting the evolution of VoIP. Topics include a brief history of the evolution of how we got here, issues and challenges such as public and private ENUM, security, and \'quality\' needs/desires of applications derived from VoIP technologies such as SIP.

There is still some debate in the SIP community about the best way to protect the service, and whether there\'s really a need for Session Border Controllers. Are they good or evil? This presentation will focus on the current practice for carrier VoIP security, the need and role for Session Border Controllers, and some lessons learned from current deployments.

PGP is a system for encrypting and verifying the authenticity of information, and is commonly used as a tool to sign and encrypt e-mail. For PGP to be useful, a means of obtaining and distributing trust in public keys is required: in PGP, this is done by adding signatures to keys to build a \"web of trust\". Key signing parties are one way to build an effective web-of-trust. Big Key Signing parties are tedious: lots of hexadecimal, and often little attention to the important matter of verifying identities. Big key signing parties are also awkward to schedule. This presentation proposes an alternative approach: to hold several, smaller key signing parties which can be interconnected by individuals who attend more than one of them. This approach is being followed for PGP Key Signing at NANOG34.

It appears that anycast illustrates and exacerbates certain types of routing instabilities. We performed a series of measurements on both Planetlab and the internet at large in an effort to better understand the dynamics of routing through the anycast perspective. We found that anycast highlights the fact that routing stability is highly variable depending on network vantage point, with some ASs seeing a wildly varying situation. We also found that routing surveys done using planetlab nodes must be done very carefully if they are to be generalized to the internet at large. Recently, our observations have been validated by RIPE using very different data. By NANOG we hope to also be able to show causes of the varying kinds of instability we have seen. <BR><BR> <A HREF=\"http://soy.dyndns.org/~peter/projects/research/anycast/nanog/\">http://soy.dyndns.org/~peter/projects/research/anycast/nanog/</A>

This presentation describes a method of building multi-host clusters for DNS service using free software. Services are provided on two more hosts, and reachability to a service address is signalled to the rest of the network from each server. In this way the service is anycast within an OSPF area. The F root nameserver is operated by ISC using nameserver clusters constructed in this manner. Issues of service monitoring, troubleshooting, stateful (TCP) transactions and necessarily-unicast, administrative functions (zone transfers, system maintenance) are discussed in some detail. The limitations of the technique with respect to load balancing, the use of other (non-DNS) protocols and operational deployment are also described.

Large-scale leaks have caused routing problems on the Internet in the past. On Dec 24, 2004, AS9121 announced over 100K routes to their peers, resulting in widely propagated invalid routes. Many large networks carried over 25K bad paths during the event, and some as many as 100K. Using BGP updates from approximately 80 peering sessions during the event, we analyze the event including the worst-hit networks, and the networks that spread the most bad paths. We find that network distance from AS9121 and maximum prefix settings on BGP sessions were not enough to prevent networks from carrying the bad prefixes. Finally, we review operational lessons learned (from feedback from involved networks) and make suggestions on future mitigation strategies.

At this Peering BOF we will explore one of several debates the Peering Coordinator community has volunteered as the most important and interesting issue facing the community today. Through debate, the competetive juices have proven to highlight the strongest arguments on both sides of a peering issue, so we will hopefully educate and entertain at the same time. In addition we will have the opportunity for those who have travelled a great distance to introduce themselves to the group, and raise ad hoc issues of interest to Peering Coordinators. <HR> From: Bill Norton Subject: Peering BOF IX at NANOG in Seattle - The Great Public vs. Private Peering Debate Hi all - Just wanted to invite you all to the upcoming Peering Birds-Of-a-Feather session at the upcoming NANOG, and give you a flavor of a couple of the topics to be discussed... Peering Introductions ------------------------------- For Peering Coordinators who would lke to introduce themselves to the North American Peering Coordinator Community, we have some time set aside for you to introduce yourself and share with the Community: Company Name and Contact Information, AS#, Where you are peering or expect to peer in the future, What you are looking for in a peer, and Why people should be interested in peering with you. We have found these face-to-face interactions helps facilitate peering, particularly for folks coming in from overseas. It helps to bring network maps, and lots of business cards. If you email [email protected] this information I will make a slide with your contact information on it that will show up behind you are you speak. The Public vs. Private Peering Debate -------------------------------------------------------- We have recruited two Peering Coordinators to articulate the two sides of the Great (Public vs. Private) Peering Debate. They have graciously agreed to share with the audience the Strongest Arguments for Public Peering (Maurice Dean), and the Strongest Arguments for Private Peering (Peter Cohen). Each side will have a few minutes to present their case, then a few minutes to attack the claims made by the other side and/or reinforce their own side of the argument as needed. We will perhaps add a few minutes in the middle for a couple of limited scope audience questions; those to help the speakers clarify a point (no speeches or attacks here). Both sides will then summarize their argument and the audience will be asked to vote for which side made the more compelling case. Audience Discussion ------------------------------- As we did last Peering BOF, we will open the floor to discussion, focusing on points that one or both sides failed to make, or failed to make strongly enough, that would have perhaps made a difference in the audience vote. Background ------------------ I researched this issue with a subset of the Peering Coordinator Community and shared the early results at the RIPE EIX WG meeting. If the discussions there are any indicator, I think we are in for an interesting and educational community discussion here. Below is an excerpt of the public vs. private peering arguments I heard from the Peering Coordinator Community and shared at the RIPE EIX WG meeting. I agree with the Peering Coordinators who believe the answer for most ISPs is a hybrid of public and private peering. I also agree that perhaps there sometimes emerges a transition based upon scale and strategic intent, but we will see what the community comes up with at the BOF. Bill PS - I cut and pasted the text below from the \"The Great (Public vs. Private Peering) Debate: Peering at 10G\" white paper that I am using to document these debates as they relate to 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet Peering. I am still looking for reviewers to provide feedback here BTW...If you are interested in this stuff and can spend a little time to provide feedback, send email to [email protected] When I feel more comfortable that I have it right, I will make the paper freely available to anyone who would like a copy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- : : The Top 4 Reasons Public Peering is better than Private Peering 1. Aggregation Benefits a. A network can easily aggregate a large number of relatively small peering sessions across a single fixed-cost peering port, with zero incremental cost per peer. (Private peering requires additional cross connects and potentially an additional interface card, so there are real costs associated with each incremental peering session.) Small peering sessions often exhibit a high degree of variability in their traffic levels, making them perfect for aggregation. Since not all peers peak at the same time, multiple peers can be multiplexed onto the shared peering fabric, with one peers peak traffic filling in the valleys of another peer\'s traffic. This helps make peering very cost effective: \"I can\'t afford to dedicate a whole gigE card to private peering with this guy, but public peering is a no-brainer.\" b. Public peering ports usually have very large gradations of bandwidth: 100Mbps Ethernet upgrades to 1Gbps Ethernet, which upgrades to 10Gbps Ethernet. With such large gradations, it is easier for smaller peers to maintain several times more capacity via public peering than they are currently using, which reduces the likelihood of congestion due to shifting traffic patterns, bursty traffic, or uncontrolled Denial of Service attacks. \"Some peers aren\'t as responsive to upgrading their peering infrastructure, nor are they of similar mind with respect for the desire for peering bandwidth headroom[1].\" The large gradations of public peering bandwidth help reconcile these two issues. 2. Ease of administration a. Public peering is the easiest and fastest way to both turn up and turn down a peering sessions, since no physical work is required. Peering is soft configured by the two parties on the router and the peering session is up. b. It is common for a network to set up a trial peering session to determine the amount of traffic that would be exchanged should a session be turned up. If there is public peering capacity available, there is no incremental cost or extra administrative work required to turn up a trial peer, and the information gathered may prevent choosing an incorrect private peering port size if the traffic is moved to a private peer later. c. Many Peering Coordinators must work within a budget, and do not have decision making authority for purchases within their company. Once the public peering switch port is ordered, there is no additional cost and therefore no additional hurdle to peering for the Peering Coordinator. d. Public Peering provides financial predictability. The hardware requirements and monthly recurring costs of peering are the same every month[2]. This makes planning and budgeting much easier. e. 10 Public Peering scales large peering sessions (those greater than 1Gbps) seamlessly, while private peering beyond gigE capacities requires private peering at 10G (very expensive), or connecting multiple gigEs together, which can be tricky[3]. 3. Public Peering is used as Selection Criteria by Customers a. Corporate and Enterprise customers continue to ask to see the list of the ISP\'s public peering points[4]. 4. Public Peering May Be the only Cost Effective way to Peer across multiple Colos a. Across Europe, where public peering across multiple collocation centers is the norm, private peering is often a much more expensive solution. Purchasing private peering circuits within a metro is potentially very expensive, while the same traffic can traverse a shared peering fabric for much less. The Top 5 Reasons Private Peering is better than Public Peering --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here are the strongest argument private peering advocates shared with the author. 1. Private Peering Sessions are Easier to Monitor a. SNMP Counters can be easily collected on each peering port to monitor the utilization of the Peering Session resources. No time intensive Netflow or expensive network analysis software[5] is required to sort through shared peering fabric data to determine per-peering-session traffic volume. b. Greater Visibility: No Blind Oversubscription Problem. With public peering, the remote peer could be congesting his port with the other peering sessions and you have no visibility into their public peering port utilization. Packets could be dropped due to port oversubscription resulting in poor peering performance. Since Private Peering involves only the two parties, when the port reaches an agreed upon utilization (say 60% utilization for example), both parties can see that it is time to upgrade the peering session. 2. Private Peering is Very Cost Effective a. If an expected peering port and cross connect costs were \$400 per month and the parties expected to send 40Mbps to each other, the EPPR would be \$400/40Mbps=$10/Mbps, a very attractive price in today\'s transit market. b. For those who exchange traffic with a few large peers, the 80%/20% rule applies; the majority of peering benefits can be derived by peering with the 20% of potential peers that deliver 80% of your traffic. This suggests fewer larger peers is preferable over picking up lots of small peers across a public peering fabric. 3. Private Peering is more reliable and easier to debug. a. Private Peering involves fewer network components that could break.[6] It should be noted that this argument weakens when the \"private\" peering are provisioned across VLANs, though optical interconnects, telco provisioned SONET services, or other active electronics. b. An architecture of private peering removes the variability of support processes across IXes[7]. Across Europe, each IX is different, and a NOC Operator may need to understand the processes, the levels of support and debugging capabilities of the switch support staff on call at the IX, and may even need to craft NOC scripts to navigate through the IX operations tasks. A private peering architecture provides consistency that helps the NOC debug and fix things more rapidly. c. The greater fear is that layer 2 fabrics could be connected through other layer two fabrics perhaps without the knowledge or consent of the peer, resulting in a very difficult debugging and diagnostics situation if a peering failure occurs. 4. Private Peering Sessions are More Secure a. A private peering network that is directly connected only with those with whom there is an explicit peering arrangement is more secure than a network that connects to a public peering fabric that includes participants with whom there is no relationship with the company. There is some history here; early exchange points were places where \"traffic stealing\" was accomplished by pointing default at an unsuspecting and poorly secured public peer. Other problems included peers tunneling traffic across the ocean across a peer\'s network. These things are explicitly disallowed in most peering and IX terms and conditions and can be further secured through filtering, but are still seen as potential hazards minimized by privately peering. b. An architecture that solely privately peers is less likely to be compromised. Since fiber has no active components that can be administered, there is nothing that can be broken into. With a switch or other active electronics in between peers, there is the possibility that traffic can be captured at the peering point without their detection. It is relatively easy to mirror a public peering port as compared with tapping into private peering fiber cross connects without the detection of the peers involved. A few ISPs pointed to technology that can passively tap into fiber interconnects, which if true, would decrease the strength of this argument. 5. Private Peering Inclination Signals a More Attractive Peer. a. The \"Big Players\" privately peer with each other and some even loath Public Peering Fabrics for historical reasons. Adopting this attitude puts one in the company of the largest Tier 1 ISPs in the world. \"For certain very large networks, public peering makes no sense at all. For certain very small networks, public peering may make perfect sense[8].\" Or put more harshly, \"if you think that public peering is a good idea, you\'re just not large enough yet[9].\" ________________________________ [1] James Rice (LoNap), formerly engineering for BBC Internet. [2] Modulo the incremental costs for hardware at the cost steps described earlier and the pricing increases at the end of contract terms with the IX Operator. It was pointed out during conversations at the RIPE 50 meeting that the LINX charges a metered rate beyond the flat peering fee, and that some IXes have a fractional gigabit Ethernet rate that causes pricing steps. [3] Patrick Gilmore (Akamai) in conversation 4/7/2005 regarding load balancing across multiple cross connects. [4] Frank Orlowski (T-Systems) in conversation 4/8/2005. [5] Some of these tools cost \$50,000 to license! [6] Remco Donker (MCI) and Nina Hjorth Bargiser (Tele Danmark) point out that some people view large capacity public peering as too risky; losing a single large public peering port would cause massive disruption to the infrastructure, and would result in much larger convergence times than if a single private peering port went out. [7] Falk Bornstaedt and Frank Orlowski (T-Systems). [8] Richard Steenbergen conversation 3/23/2005 [9] Anonymous Bill\'s Minutes From the Meeting From [email protected] Fri May 20 09:36:37 2005 Date: Thu, 19 May 2005 11:53:04 -0700 From: William B. Norton Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Peering BOF IX Meeting Minutes Peering BOF IX Meeting Minutes Seattle, WA May 16, 2005 7:30-9:00PM ...Transcribing my notes here for those who couldn\'t make the Peering BOF... comments/corrections to [email protected] or [email protected] A 5 Minute Plea for Multicast Peering ------------------------------------------------- Celeste Anderson (ISI/Los Nettos) spoke about the need for greater peering of native multicast routing. The audience commented that the volume of multicast traffic was still relatively small (a few T1\'s worth) in comparison to unicast traffic, and that there is still not significant customer demand to do so. We discussed the chicken and egg problems for a bit. Transit Survey ------------------------ A few people in the community suggested it would be good to get a sense of transit prices, to see if they were continuing to fall, remaining constant, or were rising back up. In previous white papers I had polled the Peering Coordinator Community to get a sense of transit prices for comparison against peering costs, so with this previous data and an audience survey we to take a stab. I asserted that with transit you often get what you pay for, and we were not interested in identifying the \"lowest price\", the \"bottom feeder\" price points that have no customer service, and that there is in fact a qualitative difference between transit services. I was looking for approximations of \"Tier 1 ISP\" pricing – as expected, there was some debate here. To avoid the rathole of \"Tier 1\" etc. and to focus on \"quality\" of transit services for a quick price measure I pulled together some questions to disqualify some upstream providers from the survey: Q1: When you complain about packet loss to your Upstream, you are told A) I have Bob working on it, he will call you back in 15 minutes B) Call this other number (which rings busy) C) …Let me put you on hold for an hour(Barry Manilow sings the songs that make the whole world sing) D) You should have sent your packets earlier I told folks if they answered \"C\" or \"D\" to please not answer the poll – we were not interested in bottom feeder pricing for this poll. Q2: My Upstream Provider\'s Reliability is A) 6 9\'s B) Close to 6 9\'s C) Closer to 9 6\'s D) Don\'t know – I\'ll let you know when they stay up long enough to measure. I told folks if they answered \"C\" or \"D\" to please not answer the poll– we were not interested in bottom feeder pricing for this poll. Q3: My Upstream Provider\'s Customer Service Makes Me Feel… A) Like a VIP B) Like a Nuisance C) Very, very unclean. D) Like I was just traded to another inmate for 2 packs of menthol cigarettes. I told folks if they answered \"C\" or \"D\" to please not answer the poll– we were not interested in bottom feeder pricing for this poll. Source: A couple of these questions/answers came from a Wired magazine article I read on the flight up, which referenced http://www.5ives.com. While not a particularly scientific survey, we did get 28 viable data points with the averages being: 10Mbps commit: $41.75/Mbps 100Mbps commit: $33.83/Mbps 1000Mbps commit: \$20.73/Mbps 10000Mbps commit: \$13.80/Mbps About 6 months or so ago I did a similar poll with the Peering Coordinator Community and the #s were around \$85, \$60, \$45, \$30, indicating that perhaps the transit prices have indeed fallen. If any of you are interested in the raw data (thanks to Eric Troyer for putting the data points into a spreadsheet) let me know and I\'ll email you the spreadsheet. Peering at 10G – introduction to The Great (Public vs. Private) Peering Debate ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The motivation for the Great Debate was a white paper I am working on called \"The Great (Public vs. Private) Peering Debate: Peering at 10G\" in which I documented the Peering Coordinator Community assertion and the math that the next best alternative to 10G Public Peering was many 1G Private Peering sessions. I walked through the models for both cases (10G Public and 1G Private) peering, specifying sample equipment (thanks ras!), cost estimates, etc. so we could compare the two alternatives side-by-side. There were many valid points raised during this discussion including: 1) In the modeling we were not including backbone costs, only IX and Peering equipment fees at one location, 2) There are other valid configurations of equipment, including removing the peering router and using switches by themselves (debate here as well), 3) There were a wide variety of redundancy configurations that could/should be considered as well in both cases. The nice thing about modeling this stuff is the ability to identify and discuss assumptions, to change #\'s, to have something on the table to discuss, and it was a lively discussion before and after the BOF. The punch line for the current model I shared was that public peering at 10G and private peering at 1G both are very cost effective solutions, yielding less than \$10/Mbps with a few gigabits of peering. Also, the more traffic peered, the more the cost of these two models of peering converged – so Public vs. Private becomes an architectural / religious issue. This leads to the Great Debate – when do people prefer Public Peering and when do they prefer Private Peering, and why? The Great (Public vs. Private) Peering Debate ------------------------------------------------------------------- I recruited Maurice Dean (who was the Peering Coordinator at Global Crossing and now at Google) to present and defend \"The Strongest Arguments for Public Peering\", and Peter Cohen (Peering Coordinator for Telia) to share \"The Strongest Arguments for Private Peering\". We used a modified Oxford Style Debate, providing each side three minutes for opening remarks, three minutes each to attack the other side\'s points and defend their own, a few minutes for the audience to ask clarification questions, and finally two minutes for the debaters to present summary remarks. The audience would then vote for \"Who made the more compelling case.\" Maurice started out by pointing out that IXes today are not the IXEs of 1995, but rather are large and reliable infrastructure that provide access to a rich population of potential peers. Public peering provides instantaneous access to peers, provides aggregation benefits, ease of administration and is easy to scale peering capacity. He pointed also to the marketing benefits of public peering at the IXes. Peter opened by stating that Private Peering provided superior control over peering infrastructure. He went on that Private Peering scaled very well, that the same fiber pairs could be reused as both sides simply upgraded cards. Private Peering is simpler according to Peter since no NetFlow was needed, that there were not 20 peers all peering across the same 10G interface. For some he claimed ISPs, the only way to measure public peering traffic volume to a peer was to turn down a peering session and see the difference in traffic load. Maurice countered reinforcing that modern IXes have overcome the head of line blocking issues of the past and indeed scale very well, and in fact scale well even across a metro area. He defended the NetFlow attack by mentioning that some IXes have sFlow, providing public peering visibility on a per-peer traffic volume basis. Peter countered that Maurice was a \"Stooly for the IXes\", and depending on a single port for peering is asking for trouble. Further, participation in some IXes requires going to member meetings, and who has time for that. Finally that the added complexity of adding a public peering switch was problematic – he used the analogy of air travel. \"How many of you prefer a direct flight over one with connections?\" The audience asked a variety of questions next but I did not jot them all down. A few points did come up though – that circuit upgrades for private peering can take 6 months or more depending on which side is in a hurry to upgrade. Another point was that public peering was seen by some as easier to justify to their company since it would be used across many peers. The closing remarks were a rehash of the points above, but Maurice introduced a couple additional points – that 90 day trials could be effectively done over a public peering fabric without additional costs to those attached, and that public peering fabrics enabled more opportunities (for peering? For add\'l services? For transit sales?...not sure what he meant here). Peter reasserted that placing all the eggs in one public peering port was just asking for trouble. The audience next voted \"Who presented the more compelling case?\" We had to count twice because it was so close. The final results: Public Peering presented the more compelling case: 37 Private Peering presented the more compelling case: 33 Maurice Dean won the Great Peering Debate. White Paper Available -------------------------------- I captured these and other arguments for and against private peering in the white paper mentioned above – I would love to have a few more reviewers give me some feedback/edits/etc. If you are interested in 10 Gigabit Ethernet Peering or the debate discussion, send me an email ([email protected]) with the Subject: \"The Great (Public vs. Private) Peering Debate – Peering at 10G\" and I\'ll send you a copy. If you provide comments on the draft I will add you to the acknowledgements section of the next version of the document. We were running out of time so we moved quickly to Peering Personals, giving Peering Coordinators a chance to introduce themselves to the group. Peering Personals – (jotted down everything on the sheets) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Korea Telecom – 4766 – Bong-Hwa Song – 40 Gbps Capacity, peering in Seattle PAIX, Palo Alto PAIX, EQLA, LINX, AMSIX, [email protected] AARNET – 7575 – Mark Prior – Research Net, Seattle SIX, PAIX, LAIIX, LAAP, FixW, P|Wave, [email protected] Netflix – Vish Y – [email protected] – Selective peer Steve Gibbard – PCH – 42, 3856 – Data Collection – Open Peering 0 25 locations all over the world (SIX, EQLA, LAIIX, NYIIX, PAIXNY, EQASH,NOTA,…) Steve Gibbard – Hurricane Electric – 6939 – [email protected], [email protected] – 2700 routes, public but migrating to private at EQSJO, EQLA, EQCHI, EQDAL, EQASH, PAIXPA,NYIIX, LINX, AMSIX Brokaw Price – Yahoo! – 10310 – OPEN – [email protected] Todd Underwood – 64597 – [email protected] – NOTA, LINX, Goofy peering, route collection only, store updates, Google – Maurice Dean – 15169 – selective peering – [email protected], NYIIX, EQ-CHI, EQCHI, EQASH, NOTA, PAIXPA,PAIXVA,1118th, TelX (60 Hudson)., LINX< AMSIX, LAIIX Akamai – 12222 – Patrick Gilmore – 20940 outside U.S., OPEN and at every IX, content heavy, [email protected] ESNET – 293 – Yvonne – ipv4, ipv6, multicast, EQASH, EQSJO, MAEEast MAEWest, PAIX, AADS, FixW, Pacific NW Gigapop, [email protected], selective peering policy with AUP Celeste Anderson – AS4, AS27, AS2152/2153, ISI/Los Nettos, research net, lots of eyeballs, LAIIX, LAAP, Pacific Wave, PAIX LA, Mostly OPEN~selective, eyeballs, [email protected], [email protected], Matt Peterson – SixApart , AS# pending, SIX, EQSJO, LiveJournal.com, [email protected] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hope this help!

Much work is being done to provide an IPv6 multihoming solution that doesn\'t depend on deaggergation. While the draft solutions take into consideration failover and load sharing, they fail to support some of the commonly used inter-AS traffic engineering functions. The presentation is an attempt to provide the three basic inter-AS traffic engineering approaches as a clear example of IPv6 multihoming requirements.

The Internet currently consists of a well connected core and less well connected spurs. Within the core, connectivity is good. For the rest of the world, areas that relate to the core as long spurs, its a different story. Many different ISPs in these regions have connectivity to the core, but few connect to each other. The connections to the core often extend long distances, sometimes over satellite links. Even local connectivity uses these connections, so data may have to go half way around the world and back in order to go a few miles, leading to great expense and poor performance. While true local communications are vulnerable mainly to problems with fiber links of a few miles, long distance communications are vulnerable to failures of microwave and satellite links going long distances. When local communications are carried on long distance connections, local communications become vulnerable to the reliability problems of long distance circuits. The purpose of this talk is to examine the problems this structure causes for the spur regions of the Internet, and to propose some solutions.

Tuesday afternoon and evening: Community Dialog On Tuesday afternoon we\'ll work together to resolve open issues remaining from Sunday evening. By Tuesday evening, we\'ll be ready to prepare an action plan for next steps to take in the continuing evolution of NANOG. <HR> <B>Steve Gibbard\'s notes from Tuesday\'s meeting</B><BR> From: Steve Gibbard <BR> Subject: Notes from today\'s NANOG \"community meeting\" <BR><BR> Merit had many hours scheduled for discussions on the future of NANOG today. After less than 45 minutes, we agreed to all \"declare victory and enjoy a beautiful afternoon.\" <BR><BR> Mike McPherson, Merit\'s President, presented Merit\'s draft of the NANOG bylaw proposal. Merit\'s draft is quite similar to my version of the NANOG Reform bylaw proposal presented on these lists a few weeks ago, being the same word for word in some places with some differences in others. <BR><BR> Merit invited Steve Feldman, the program committee chair, and Marty Hannigan, who they had somehow decided was a representative of the NANOG Reform group, to comment on it. Steve said the program committee was willing to accept the proposal and that he was glad Merit was now thinking about what NANOG should be. Marty disclaimed representation of the NANOG Reform group (rightly -- he wasn\'t part of the NANOG Reform proposals), but said he agreed with Merit\'s proposal too. <BR><BR> As the most recent editor of the NANOG Reform bylaws, I thanked Merit for their proposal, and said I thought it was an improvement over by own. <BR><BR> Various others expressed support for the Merit proposal. <BR><BR> Mitchell Rose expressed a concern that the summary of the Merit proposal on the slides referenced NANOG as an organization for Internet service providers, and appeared to be excluding other large network operators. Merit agreed that this could be changed, but it appears that was wording only in the Powerpoint summary and not in their actual draft. <BR><BR> Vijay Gill said we\'re all crazy and should just go back to how things were. Nobody seemed willing to publicly agree with him. <BR><BR> Daniel Karrenberg suggested that since we all seemed to be agreeing with each other, we should \"declare victory and go home.\" There seemed to be general agreement with that. <BR><BR> So, it looks like we\'ll end up with the Merit draft or something pretty close to that, which I think is the right outcome. We should have \"steering committee\" elections sometime this summer, with the committee in place in time for the fall NANOG. I told Susan Harris that I\'d be happy to help with wording as they finalize it. She seemed receptive to that idea. -Steve