Being in California, I get to see my UPSes tested a lot if I like it or not.
In my limited global BGP experience, one problem is the limitations on
Independent, Portable IP space. If ARIN is unwilling to assign less than a
/20, then you're forced to use Provider non-Portable IP space. Furthermore,
if you're multihoming you're more likely to use the additional IP space you
get from each provider (it's much easier to get 1-3 class Cs up front from a
new ISP then to go back to an existing ISP and get more).
For this reason, we've got 7 /24s and one /23 from 3 different ISPs. If we
could even get a /21 from ARIN it would make much more sense to me. Then,
instead of announcing 8 different routes it'd be one single route.
I haven't even begin to look into IPv6 yet, but this is one way IP
allocation could be greatly enhanced: Right now netblocks are assigned to
ISPs/customers in direct sequence (or even ISPs that sub-delegate them to
customers in sequence). So if you only need one /24, you get only one, and
in 6 mos. if you need more, you're going to get one that isn't anywhere near
the other.
But instead, if they kept "large" gaps between allocation for future growth,
when an end customer needs more IP space, they're just assigned the next
blocks and the bits in the mask grow (and from a global point of you, that'd
be all you see, no extra blocks announced with an existing AS's growth, just
a change in bit mask).
Of course this isn't practical with IPv4, but I'm hoping that's how IPv6 is
being allocated. Of course, you might say "Why not just assign really big
netblocks to everyone that wants them since the IP space is so big?". In
short sight it might not be a bad idea, but that's the same sort of thinking
that go us in trouble with classful assignments and entire class A blocks
going to companies.
Oh, I'm probably just rambling. Well, I'm sure of it, but perhaps I'm
making some sense.
Of course when you consider the lack of support for IPv6 thus far... I mean
Cisco IOS doesn't even support it (yet).
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/732/Tech/ipv6/
http://www.totaltele.com/view.asp?articleID=39924&Pub=TT&categoryid=626&kw=c
isco
Looks like 12.2(1)T will, but many won't use non-General Release versions,
so that puts it another quarter away in 12.3.
--
Jason Roysdon, CCNP+Security/CCDP, MCSE, CNA, Network+, A+
List email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://jason.artoo.net/
""Howard C. Berkowitz"" wrote in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> (with a red face, reconstructing my original response. We're having
> a violent thunderstorm, and the power went out. I saved a lot of
> things, but trusted my UPS. Unfortunately, the UPS is much more
> helpful when the CPU is plugged into one of the battery backup
> outlets, not a surge protector outlet. Now it is!)
>
> >Priscilla wrote, in response to John Hardman,
>
>
>
> >Well, you're preaching to the choir, but I have a couple comments in line
> >nonetheless. A really technical discussion would require more knowledge
of
> >statistics, queuing theory, etc., than I have. But it can't hurt to
discuss
> >the issues at a high level also.
> >
> >
> >
> >In the phone industry, we can use Erlang and other obscure methods for
> >calculating the amount of bandwidth needed based on an acceptable
frequency
> >of someone picking up the phone and not getting dial tone. Why can't we
do
> >something similar with networking? I suspect it's because network traffic
> >is so different from phone traffic. We claim that network traffic is
> >"bursty," but it's not nearly as bursty as phone traffic. There's very
> >little quiet time. Even if the user isn't doing something there's still
> >overhead traffic, keepalives, routing table updates, etc. The
consequences
> >of not being able to send this overhead traffic can result in serious
> >performance degradation.
>
> While Erlang C distributions can be of some use in estimating
> buffered data network device capacity, the statistical aspects get
> complex. The "conventional wisdom" was that packet interarrivals
> were exponential, but more recent research (e.g., by Will Leland at
> Telecordia) showed that fractal distributions were much more
> accurate. There's also the aspect that traffic in a routed system is
> actively affected by congestion and other feedback.
>
> A surprisingly large number of Internet packets are 40 to 48 bytes.
> These turn out to be TCP, and primarily HTTP, acknowledgements,
> possibly with some buffer padding beyond the essential 20 bytes of IP
> and 20 bytes of TCP. HTTP is _not_ bandwidth efficient, or address
> space efficient, but there's a lot of inertia in upgrading it.
>
> >
> >
> > >
> >>Now this begs the next question... do people need 99.999% uptime on the
> >>phone system or on their network? Keep in mind that 99.999% uptime
equals
> to
> >>apx 1 minute of downtime per 30 days.
>
> And adding each additional nine adds a lot of cost. Also, adding
> redundancy in particular parts of the overall system doesn't
> necessarily make things better. Perhaps going wildly off topic,
> perhaps not, professional futurists use the idea of a
> "Hahn-Strasseman point" in forecasting technology. That refers to the
> physical demonstration of nuclear fission. All the theoretical work
> in the world wasn't going to go much farther without that
> experimental breakthrough. In other cases, all the experiments in
> the world may be waiting on theoretical breakthroughs.
>
> In networking, there's a point at which you MUST physically
> diversify, to protect against major disasters. Military command
> posts like Cheyenne Mountain or Raven Rock could at one point have a
> chance against nuclear attack, but not when warheads reached a
> certain level of accuracy. Nuclear warfighting strategy means get the
> National Command Authority into an airborne, mobile command post
> ASAP--and have a chain of delegation if that plane becomes a
> fireball. If your mission-critical data center sits on the San
> Andreas Fault, it might survive The Big One, but the power and data
> cables to it aren't as likely.
>
> There's also the sorts of problems that redundancy doesn't help.
> Radia Perlman's dissertation is on the Byzantine Corruption Problem,
> which deals with the class of reliability problems that are caused by
> at least partially incorrect information rather than nodal failures.
> Routing protocols are subject to Byzantine Corruption.
> >
> > >
> >>With the idea that BGP is growing widely with all of the /24 companies
> >>joining the table, is a real shame. I would venture to say that many of
the
> >>companies out there could stand to take the down time of a single
> connection
> > >or a multiple connection to the same ISP and never really hurt their
> >>business.
> >>I can not say if BGP will scale to meet this growing "need", but I
> >>can tell you that having to get more and more memory and CPU to handle
the
> >>larger and larger routing table is a burden and a pain. Hopefully
someone
> > >much more intelligent than I will find a simple and easy solution.
>
> Simple answer: without at least some operational changes, we have
> 2-5 years before the global routing system gets into real trouble.
> There are short-term fixes being considered, but 7-10 years out calls
> for new research ideas.
>
> I'm one of the speakers at the Internet Society meeting coming up in
> Stockholm, in the "New Approaches to Internet Routing" session
> chaired by Lyman Chapin. I will be defining the problem space--the
> "what problem are we trying to solve" section. Sue Hares will talk
> about short-term fixes to both BGP proper and operational practices,
> and Frank Kastenholz will talk about research trends for the long
> term.
>
> There are lots of problems. It's more than the pure number of routes.
> Contrast, for example, the number of "best" routes seen with a show
> ip bgp at a major Tier 1 provider router, with the total number of
> routes in the BGP Loc-RIB. It used to be a ratio of about 4 or 5
> route instances to each best route, but the ratio is climbing to more
> like 10:1. The Internet routing topology, conceived to be
> hierarchical, is flattening.
>
> People are injecting routes for not necessarily good reasons other
> than their own desires -- the tragedy of the commons (below) is
> relevant. People want to "multihome," but don't necessarily do it in
> a manner that really improves their overall reliability. Another big
> problem is injecting lots of routes for traffic engineering -- the
> desire for "load balancing". Some routes simply are being injected
> due to cluelessness. If you are in Australia and there are only four
> (hypothetically) transoceanic links leaving the continent, there
> really is no value for your /24 being seen in Norway or Argentina.
>
> It's not so much a memory as a processing and convergence problem.
> The more little routes, the more they are likely to change and force
> routers to reconverge. BGP uses a path vector algorithm, which
> derives from distance vector, and has the classic tradeoff of
> stability (e.g., using holddown) versus fast convergence with
> possible loops. We've also learned that the conventional wisdom that
> "bad news travels fast" -- withdrawals propagate faster than
> announcements -- is wrong; things work the other way around.
>
> >
> >But as Howard and Geoff would say, we're dealing with the "tragedy of the
> >commons." Everyone wants to meet their own particular needs and is
> >unwilling to meet the needs of the overall community. The phrase comes
from
> >something to do with sheep herders sharing a common area in Medieval
> >Britain, if I recall. ;-)
> >
> One of the few things I remember from Economics 101, and very
> relevant. Small English farming communities would have a commons, or
> shared grazing area for livestock. It had enough capacity to feed
> the animals that the households needed for their household meat,
> milk, wool, etc.
>
> But some greedy residents sent additional animals, intended for sale,
> into the common area. Overgrazing soon wiped out the entire pasture.
>
> And so it is with routing. Yakov Rekhter once observed that an IP
> address has economic value if, and only if, it is reachable. Load
> balancing may not be worth it if it causes instability. Multihoming
> to more than two providers in a geographic area may be a matter of
> diminishing returns, especially if local loop, electrical power, or
> server redundancy isn't at the same level. Multihoming to more than
> one POP of a single and reliable provider may be much more effective
> than many people believe.
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