Re: FIBER CUT: Dallas to West Coast

[Patrick Greenwell <patrick () cybernothing org>]

On 30 Aug 2001, Sean Donelan wrote:

> On Wed, 29 August 2001, Patrick Greenwell wrote:
> > > The difference is the carrier's response, in particular how well they
> > > keep their customers informed.
> >
> > That is certainly *a* point of differentiation, however if the goal of
> > these "basement dual-homers" is to not suffer downtime due to the
> > outage of a single provider(much like the organizations that "matter"),
> > all the responsiveness in the world from a provider whose circuit to
> > one of the "basement dual-homers" which has failed isn't going to prevent
> > them from being down, is it?
>
> I don't know what the goal of "basement dual-homers" is.  I think that
> is the other thread, which I haven't been keeping up with.

My point was simply that the "basement dual-homers" probably want the same
thing as the "people that matter", which is disparate paths to the
Internet.

*snipped a lot of things I agree with*

> With DHCP, you could just unplug from one provider and plug into the new
> one, and auto-magically have connectivity.  With Dynamic DNS update you
> could automagically redirect your DNS name to your new address.  IP addresses
> could be assigned geographically, instead of by provider, and aggregation
> could take place anywhere from the census tract level to the hemisphere level.

Except for the small problem that there is no guarantee that DNS servers
will honor TTLs,  that this solution would necessitate dialing down
TTLs to the lowest possible value to maximize effectiveness which would
greatly increase DNS-related traffic, and flapping could be really ugly.

DNS in lieu of a routing protocol make me uncomfortable.