Re: Is it normal for your provider to withhold BGP peering info until the night of the cut?

[Bryan Socha via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

I know of 2 larger providers that have strange provisioning processes.
Both of them do layer 0/line testing and then their bgp group gets the
order to finish the routing.    It's not that they are withholding the
info, they haven't done the bgp policy yet and it happens during turnup
testing.

But the data is fairly standard, what were you missing that wasn't on the
tech/bgp form you fill out at the start of setup?



Bryan Socha
Network Engineer
DigitalOcean


On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 4:26 PM, c b <bz_siege_01 () hotmail com> wrote:

> We have 4 full-peering providers between two data centers. Our accounting
> people did some shopping and found that there was a competitor who came in
> substantially lower this year and leadership decided to swap our most
> expensive circuit to the new carrier.
> (I don't know what etiquette is, so I won't name the carrier... but it's a
> well-known name)
> Anyways, we were preparing for the circuit cutover and asked for the BGP
> peering info up front like we normally do. This carrier said that they
> don't provide this until the night of the cut. Now, we've done this 5 or 6
> times over the years with all of our other carriers and this is the first
> one to ever do this. We even escalated to our account manager and they
> still won't provide it.
> I know it's not a huge deal, but life is so much easier when you can
> prestage your cut and rollback commands. In fact, our internal Change
> Management process mandates peer review all proposed config changes and now
> we have to explain why some lines say TBD!
> Is this a common SOP nowadays? Anyone care to explain why they wouldn't
> just provide it ahead of time?
> Thanks in advance.
> CWB