Re: Heads up: Long AS-sets announced in the next few days

[James <haesu () towardex com>]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 07:40:53PM -0500, Matthew Crocker wrote:

[ snip ]

> Oh, I don't know,  increasing the size of an already bloated global 
> routing table; 
> possibly crashing routers which are already starving 
> for FIB RAM? 

Probably not FIB, may be the BGP RIB for the most people that
may be affected. If it is FIB that we are concerned about, well..
its only two additional prefixes to be held. I think the top polluters
on www.cidr-report.org are more so on the critical path than this
experiment.

> A certain level of stability is to be expected on the 
> global routing table.  Playing with it isn't a 'good thing'.  Besides 
> the fact that they are experimenting with the core of the Internet.  

They are not playing with the core. The result of what they are doing
is dependent on specific topology and level of direction they are
throwing prefixes at.

> What if their experiments had an unwanted effect?  What is the global 
> financial impact of backbone instability?  That is an awful big grenade 
> they are chucking about.
>
> I think it is irresponsible for someone, no matter how educated or well 
> intentioned to throw experiments into the middle of the network.

While I will not dispute your statement, I believe that every ASN should
be responsible of their own and should not trust the General Internet to
not cause harm on their network. If your router is going to crash b/c of
someone advertising an unusual AS_PATH, I don't view that differently
from a box getting owned because it was running unpatched OS since
1999 without any firewall rules either.

-J