Re: East Coast outage?

[Michael.Dillon () radianz com]

> Perhaps the lesson to learn is that very large networks don't always 
> lead to very high stability. A much larger number of smaller, more 
> autonomous generation and transmission facilities might have much more 
> reasonable interconnection requirements, and hence less wide-ranging 
> failure modes.

And if we extrapolate that lesson to IP networks it implies that any
medium to large sized organization should do their own BGP peering
and multihome to 3 or more upstream network providers. On the other
hand, if you understand why electrical networks shed load and develop
their cascading failures, you might see some parallels between "load"
and the propagation of BGP announcements which are worrying.

Perhaps we should start working on a hierarchical routing system in
which the concept of a "global routing table" cannot develop. Perhaps
announcements and withdraws should have a TTL so that they never 
propogate very far from their source AS?

--Michael Dillon