Re: Broken Internet?

[Peter Francis <peter () softaware com>]

<snip>
> I don't advise use of DSL regardless, but why is a colo better than a
> hardened facility owned by a company, with off-grid power, and multiple
> DS-3 lines?

This discussion started when someone questioned whether the "difficulty" of multi-homing was a barrier to entry for 
SMALL businesses. I can think of no definition of SMALL that includes the ability to build a "hardened facility" with 
"off-grid power" and "multiple DS-3 lines.

Come on now.  If you have that kind of capital then you might as well just go out and buy a small hosting company.  
This gets you enough usage to meet the minimum requirement for a portable CIDR block plus income from the hosting.

I'm tired of people waving the "I must be multi-homed" flag around without actually looking at where the highest risk 
points of failure are and focusing their resources there first.

For a SMALL business with < $50,000/year to spend on infrastructure you can get yourself well up into the 99th 
percentile of uptime withthe colo/T1 model.  Then you can go spend the rest up your time and money building a business 
that actually works.  Any SMALL business that doesn't have a solid enough relationship with its customers to survive 
the < 1%  chanced outage has a bogus business model in the first place.

If you really want to be careful about things get two T1's, one back into your colo-site and one to another provider.  
Keep your DNS ttl's low, say 10 minutes, and run a secondary nameserver and backup server for your site off the 
non-colo-provider's T1 address space.  Use dhcp for your office LAN and run a resolver with 2 nic cards, one talking to 
each T1.  You get the picture.  You are now way out beyond the 99th percentile at the cost of keeping one decent sys 
admin on staff.

Peter

> Just because that company only needs 200 public IP
> addresses, why should they be unable to multi-home?
>
> It's entirely possible to build a mission critical data center better
> than the average colo, and certainly more secure than many colos.
>
> There's a TECHNICAL issue here in HOW to implement multihoming
> successfully. We have a policy issue at ARIN, APNIC and RIPE which is
> keeping the issue from becoming one which people pay enough attention
> to. If it were in our faces more, perhaps better solutions would be
> proposed and implemented.
>
> > > 3. to be able to have its net-block(s) visible regardless of which ISPs they
> > > are currently using.
> >
> > How do you propose doing this without growing the routing table 1-2 orders of magnitude?
>
> We can't. The point, though, is that the Internet needs to have a GOOD
> way to support multihoming. We presently DO NOT have a good mechanism
> for this. The IPv6 approach to this does not appear workable either.
>
> This is a problem for the IETF, not NANOG, though, to solve. Getting
> people to understand there IS a problem needing a solution appears to be
> more than half the battle.
>
> > > Currently the only ones that can do that are those that;
> > > 1. Are large enough to justify a /20 (begging the question of how they got
> > > that large).
> > > 2. Can afford their own datacenter.
> > >
> > > It looks like our technical solutions are raising unreasonable barriers to
> > > entry for small businesses.
> >
> > No.  Co-lo your website and "intranet".  Get two T1's that same provider via two different entry points/carriers to 
> > your office (if possible) and you should be about as rock solid you could expect for $2-3000/month or there abouts.
>
> Great. So when this one upstream provider screws up, you're still dead.
> When there's a routing table problem and that upstream's advertisement
> for your block isn't seen by 1/2 the world, you're dead.
>
> We HAVE built an environment where businesses are forced into such
> situations UNLESS they are lucky enough to have grabbed IP address space
> early in the life of the 'net, or are big companies. Colo isn't always
> the answer.
>
> > Peter
>
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Daniel Senie                                        dts () senie com
> Amaranth Networks Inc.                    http://www.amaranth.com