Re: BGP failure analysis and recommendations

[Brandon Ross <bross () pobox com>]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2013, Christopher Morrow wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 10:40 PM, JRC NOC
> <nospam-nanog () jensenresearch com> wrote:
>
> > Have we/they lost something important in the changeover to converged
> > mutiprotocol networks?
> > Is there a better way for us edge networks to achieve IP resiliency in the
> > current environment?
>
> sadly I bet not, aside from active probing and disabling paths that
> are non-functional.

Um, how about, don't buy services from network providers that fail in this 
way?

Since we're not naming names, I won't, but in the past there's been at 
least one provider that used multi-hop eBGP at their edges because they 
didn't want to invest in edge gear that could handle a full BGP table.  My 
concern with their network (beyond many other concerns) was that when that 
router in the middle had a soft failure, how would BGP know to route 
around it?  Answer: it wouldn't, you'd black hole.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, there was at least one provider that 
used custom software to actively probe their upstream providers and route 
around poor performance.  At one time, there was also software, hardware 
and services that you could install/run on your own network to try to 
detect these things as well, however I'm not sure how many of them are 
still on the market.

The bottom line, however, is don't buy services from companies that do a 
poor job of running their network unless you can accept these kinds of 
failures.

--
Brandon Ross                                      Yahoo & AIM:  BrandonNRoss
+1-404-635-6667                                                ICQ:  2269442
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