Re: Arbitrary de-peering

["Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick () ianai net>]

On Jul 28, 2008, at 11:24 AM, William Waites wrote:
> Le 08-07-28 à 17:12, nancyp () yorku ca a écrit :
>
> > ----Example: A York University professor was sitting at his desk at  
> > work in
> > March 2008 trying to reach an internet website located somewhere in  
> > Europe.
> > [...] York’s bandwidth supplier is Cogent which had severed a  
> > peering relationship
> > with a bandwidth provider in Europe called Telia [...] which was  
> > the bandwidth
> > network provider for the website that the Professor was trying to  
> > reach. [...]
> > Cogent did not proactively inform the University of the issue and  
> > the loss of
> > connectivity. Unreachability due to arbitrariness in network  
> > peering is unacceptable.
>
> There must be more to this story. If Cogent de-peered from Telia the  
> traffic would
> normally just have taken another path.

One should check one's assumptions before posting to 10K+ of their not- 
so-close friends.

Neither network has transit.  What other path is there to take?

Once you answer that, I'll read the rest of your e-mail.

--
TTFN,
patrick


> Either there was a configuration error of some
> sort or else some sort of proactive black-holing on one side or the  
> other. As the
> latter would be surprising and very heavy handed, I would tend to  
> suspect the former.
>
> Peering relationships are made and severed all the time with no  
> particular ill-effects,
> unless you can point to examples of outright malice (i.e. of the  
> black-holing kind) I
> don't think there is much basis for any public policy decisions in  
> this example.
>
> Unreachability due to configuation error is of course relatively  
> common; perhaps I am
> wrong, but I don't think the CRTC would really have much to say  
> about that.
>
> Cheers,
> -w