Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Forrest Christian (List Account)
I think the key difference here is that I really just wanted HE to treat my
routes no differently no matter how they learned them.   I wanted them to
apply normal BGP routing rules to them..  that is, pick the path with the
shortest AS path.

>From a strictly technical basis, its silly to prefer a path of
AS6939-AS-A4043 to a path of AS6969‐AS4043.I understand the
business reasons of wanting to send traffic down circuits where you get
paid, but how many intermediate ASNs do there need to be in the middle
before it makes sense to ignore the business reasons for doing so?I
guess once you get paid for pushing the traffic one doesn't really care,
but at some point one has to look at the network efficiencies here.

In this case, we were purchasing a DSL aggregation service from another
regional provider after our DSL customer base reached the point where it no
longer made sense for us to maintain our own infrastructure.  What we
really needed was a peering connection with them but they were technically
unable to make this happen, so it ended up being transit which we found out
after the agreement was signed.

I vaguely remember them giving some reason why they couldn't do a no export
on our routes inside their network (maybe running multiple networks under
different ASNs due to acquisitions or some technical shortcomings of their
network, don't remember for sure).  But one way or another they ended up
announcing our routes to HE and couldn't or wouldn't stop doing so.

This basically bit us in the rear with HE which is why I was griping.   HE
has such a big footprint that that connection attracted a large percentage
of our overall traffic. I would have been happy with any of several common
community strings that people use.Set localpref. Don't export.  And so
on.  Just send us traffic literally any other way other than this one.   Or
less traffic.  Ideally, setting the localpref to the same value as a
peering customer would have been ideal, because then the path length would
have been taken as the selection criteria.  I would have been fine if
no-export came along for the ride as a side effect.

What ended up happening instead is that the only way we could fix this is
that we did the evil things that you discussed and split all of our
prefixes in half and announced them everywhere else both ways.The
regional ISP for whatever reason didn't learn the smaller prefixes so the
peering worked fine (I suspect they may not have been taking a full table)
  And, since we now appeared as a customer of HE we ended up getting
transit from them for free across our IX link, although in realty the
amount of extra traffic was minimal (except during a couple of network
events) .

I really would have rather been able to tell Hurricane to just ignore this
route or treat it as a peer or something like that.

This whole service has been disconnected for some time now, so it doesn't
really matter much to me other than it still frustrates me that we had to
go down the other path to fix this when a commonly implemented community
string may have eliminated the need to do so.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 4:51 PM Tony Wicks  wrote:

> >
> > I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.
> > However in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to
> > you directly via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct
> > connection?  or at least not prefer the customer learned routes.
>
> So from my experience of working at transit providers over more years than
> I care to contemplate I can assure you what may seem to make sense as a
> customer does not necessarily translate to how IP routing works. IP has no
> concept of Customer or Peer it is simply designed to hand the packet to a
> valid next hop as determined by policies. As such routes are normally
> divided into customer, peer or further upstream transit if you are not one
> of the tier 1 providers. A peer provides you no income, a customer (a
> customer of a customer is largely the same thing as being a direct
> customer). Take the example of the customer buying a transit service on a
> 95th percentile basis. So as a transit provider I get paid based on how
> much traffic I hand to that port(s) and in turn I provide connectivity to
> all my peers, customers and upstream transits all over the world. I can't
> do this for free as then I can't pay for my network and I am a company not
> a charity. Customer X advertises his lets say a /22 to me, all good. But
> then customer X advertises his /22 and some disaggregated /24's to a local
> peering exchange that I am also connected to. If I do not both prioritise
> customer X's customer port routes AND drop any more specific routes learnt
> from customer X then I will end up handing all customer X's outgoing
> traffic to them over the peering instead of the revenue generating port. I
> have seen customers do this both through innocent and malicious intent.
> Sure, there are a lot of complex 

RE: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Tony Wicks
>
> I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.
> However in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to 
> you directly via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct 
> connection?  or at least not prefer the customer learned routes.

So from my experience of working at transit providers over more years than I 
care to contemplate I can assure you what may seem to make sense as a customer 
does not necessarily translate to how IP routing works. IP has no concept of 
Customer or Peer it is simply designed to hand the packet to a valid next hop 
as determined by policies. As such routes are normally divided into customer, 
peer or further upstream transit if you are not one of the tier 1 providers. A 
peer provides you no income, a customer (a customer of a customer is largely 
the same thing as being a direct customer). Take the example of the customer 
buying a transit service on a 95th percentile basis. So as a transit provider I 
get paid based on how much traffic I hand to that port(s) and in turn I provide 
connectivity to all my peers, customers and upstream transits all over the 
world. I can't do this for free as then I can't pay for my network and I am a 
company not a charity. Customer X advertises his lets say a /22 to me, all 
good. But then customer X advertises his /22 and some disaggregated /24's to a 
local peering exchange that I am also connected to. If I do not both prioritise 
customer X's customer port routes AND drop any more specific routes learnt from 
customer X then I will end up handing all customer X's outgoing traffic to them 
over the peering instead of the revenue generating port. I have seen customers 
do this both through innocent and malicious intent. Sure, there are a lot of 
complex policies that I might apply to accept local traffic in one area and 
hand other traffic via the transit port but why on earth would I do that and 
likely cause all sorts of other potential routing issues while reducing the 
revenue I am entitled to?



Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Randy Bush
most networks prefer customers over peers.  a few networks don't, some
large.  if they changed, customers would scream at them about the newly
overloaded customer circuit.

we are not required to like this :)

randy


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Lukas Tribus
On Mon, 25 Jul 2022 at 16:23, Forrest Christian (List Account)
 wrote:
>
> I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.
> However in the case where a customer of a customer also
> connects to you directly via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer
> the direct connection?  or at least not prefer the customer learned routes.

No, I don't think it makes sense at all.

Not preferring customer routes over peering routes would mean:
- less revenue for HE
- less revenue for the HE customer (your transit provider)
- risk of upsetting the customer for the previous reason (less revenue)
- for your transit provider it would mean they would provide a transit
service with less redundancy (see below), less ingress-paths (see
below), and more complicated configuration (and therefore more complex
troubleshooting)

The only difference is that HE doesn't provide BGP communities for
your transit provider for TE. *But even if HE would provide THE
communities*, it's not in the best interest of your transit provider
to actually pass those BGP communities to HE or configure them for
you, because it would mean less traffic on revenue generating links,
so it would not make sense from a business perspective. It would also
likely require manual configuration of policies, which can be
difficult, undesirable or not possible at all, depending on the amount
of automation in that network.

> I don't remember why,  but we couldn't have the transit provider not announce 
> our routes toward HE

And why would they send for your routes specifically or pass through
BGP communities to HE, when they are already refusing to withdraw
announcements to HE?

Businesses don't usually go the extra mile to make everything worse
for them (revenue, configuration and support complexity, redundancy,
performance due to amount of ingress paths).

HE is special in this regards for 2 reasons:

- HE doesn't provide TE communities for customers (which is bad and a
showstopper for some)
- but more importantly, HE has an open peering policy so they actual
peer with you in the first place; otherwise we wouldn't have this
discussion

There are a few technical aspects that to consider:

Once HE's best path is a peer route, as opposed to a customer route
(which is what you are asking), then those routes would not be
announced by HE to its peers anymore (after all, they don't exchange
peer routes with peers).

So you'd be worse off in some aspects, because your ingress traffic
wouldn't be attracted by HE's (vast) peering network anymore. Also if
you are single-homed to this transit-provider, and this
transit-provider also temporarily single-homes to HE (maybe for
maintenance one 1 of 2 transits), you'd be disconnected from pretty
much the rest of the internet (that doesn't have HE transit), until
you shutdown your HE peering. So less ingress paths, less redundancy,
etc.

There are good business and technical reasons for preferring customer
routes. Many networks don't even peer with customers of customers,
also for good reasons.

I don't think it makes any sense to consider a shorter as-path over
peering when it also comes from a customer (with a longer as-path).


- lukas


RE: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Brian Turnbow via NANOG
> Google has let you down, 6730 (sunrise) is not 6939 (HE) ;)
> 

Oops I should check thing better at the end of the day ..
My bad




Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Lukas Tribus
On Mon, 25 Jul 2022 at 17:19, Brian Turnbow via NANOG  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> >I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.   However 
> >in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to you directly via 
> >peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct connection?  or at >least 
> >not prefer the customer learned routes.
>
> Business not technical. Fill up the bandwidth and they will buy more!!
>
> >In our situation, we were buying transit, heavily prepended, from a provider 
> >on a tiny circuit.   The purpose of the transit was related to another 
> >service we were acquiring from that provider and wasn't about the transit, 
> >but >the  transit was needed for the service to work reliably.   
> >Unfortunately this provider was also a HE customer and so we now had all of 
> >the HE traffic coming down this tiny link, since all of our other transit 
> >providers and >ourselves only peered with HE.
>
> >I don't remember why,  but we couldn't have the transit provider not 
> >announce our routes toward HE, so we ended up doing the announce more 
> >specifics everywhere else thing.   Which I hate doing on so many levels.
>
> >Thus the desire for a community to tell HE that although they learned this 
> >route from a customer, it is not a customer route.
>
> You can use communities to set the local preference with HE.
> This should do the trick
>   6730:0008   set local pref to 64   (lowest they have afaik)

Google has let you down, 6730 (sunrise) is not 6939 (HE) ;)

Afaik HE does not provide TE communities.


Lukas


RE: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Brian Turnbow via NANOG
Hi,

>I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.   However in 
>the case where a customer of a customer also connects to you directly via 
>peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct connection?  or at >least 
>not prefer the customer learned routes.

Business not technical. Fill up the bandwidth and they will buy more!!

>In our situation, we were buying transit, heavily prepended, from a provider 
>on a tiny circuit.   The purpose of the transit was related to another service 
>we were acquiring from that provider and wasn't about the transit, but >the  
>transit was needed for the service to work reliably.   Unfortunately this 
>provider was also a HE customer and so we now had all of the HE traffic coming 
>down this tiny link, since all of our other transit providers and >ourselves 
>only peered with HE.

>I don't remember why,  but we couldn't have the transit provider not announce 
>our routes toward HE, so we ended up doing the announce more specifics 
>everywhere else thing.   Which I hate doing on so many levels. 

>Thus the desire for a community to tell HE that although they learned this 
>route from a customer, it is not a customer route.

You can use communities to set the local preference with HE.
This should do the trick 
  6730:0008   set local pref to 64   (lowest they have afaik)
Provided that  your provider accepts it and propagates it.
Or you can ask them to set it for you.

Brian


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Heasley


> Am 7/25/22 um 12:45 schrieb Forrest Christian (List Account) 
> :
> 
> 
> I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned from a 
> customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in half and announce them 
> that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX peering 
> session as opposed to one of my transit providers.

When you buy from the lowest bidder, this what you receive. You know how to fix 
it. 

> 
> I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work. 
> 
>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:43 PM Siyuan Miao  wrote:
>> They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel  
>>> wrote:
>>> Yes.
>>> 
>>> Ryan
>>> 
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: NANOG  On Behalf Of Rubens 
>>> Kuhl
>>> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
>>> To: Nanog 
>>> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>>> 
>>> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for 
>>> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>>> 
>>> Is that still the case a year later ?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Rubens
>>> 


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Forrest Christian (List Account)
I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.   However
in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to you directly
via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct connection?  or at
least not prefer the customer learned routes.

In our situation, we were buying transit, heavily prepended, from a
provider on a tiny circuit.   The purpose of the transit was related to
another service we were acquiring from that provider and wasn't about the
transit, but the  transit was needed for the service to work reliably.
 Unfortunately this provider was also a HE customer and so we now had all
of the HE traffic coming down this tiny link, since all of our other
transit providers and ourselves only peered with HE.

I don't remember why,  but we couldn't have the transit provider not
announce our routes toward HE, so we ended up doing the announce more
specifics everywhere else thing.   Which I hate doing on so many levels.

Thus the desire for a community to tell HE that although they learned this
route from a customer, it is not a customer route.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 5:21 AM Jared Mauch  wrote:

> You always want to prefer customer routes over non customer routes as a
> service provider. Of course having a robust set of communities to let
> adjustments happen helps.
>
> Without proper tiering of routes you may see unstable routing.
>
> Having a standard set of customer, peer, transit set of local preferences
> would go a long way. Same for geographic scope of routes, only use these on
> same continent. Makes using a provider if you do something like anycast
> hard if they haul you long distance.
>
> - Jared
>
> Sent via RFC1925 compliant device
>
> On Jul 25, 2022, at 6:49 AM, Forrest Christian (List Account) <
> li...@packetflux.com> wrote:
>
> 
> I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned
> from a customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in half and announce
> them that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX
> peering session as opposed to one of my transit providers.
>
> I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work.
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:43 PM Siyuan Miao  wrote:
>
>> They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes.
>>>
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: NANOG  On Behalf Of
>>> Rubens Kuhl
>>> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
>>> To: Nanog 
>>> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>>>
>>> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for
>>> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>>>
>>> Is that still the case a year later ?
>>>
>>>
>>> Rubens
>>>
>>>


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Rafael Possamai
>I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned from a 
>customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in >half and announce them 
>that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX peering 
>session as opposed to >one of my transit providers.
>I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work. 

I think this is by design so you don't end up with free inbound transit.

If one of their transit customers is trying to reach your prefixes, my guess 
it'd make sense to offload that over IX first, although I'm not sure if that's 
always happens due to path selection.




Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Jared Mauch
You always want to prefer customer routes over non customer routes as a service 
provider. Of course having a robust set of communities to let adjustments 
happen helps. 

Without proper tiering of routes you may see unstable routing. 

Having a standard set of customer, peer, transit set of local preferences would 
go a long way. Same for geographic scope of routes, only use these on same 
continent. Makes using a provider if you do something like anycast hard if they 
haul you long distance.  

- Jared 

Sent via RFC1925 compliant device

> On Jul 25, 2022, at 6:49 AM, Forrest Christian (List Account) 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned from a 
> customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in half and announce them 
> that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX peering 
> session as opposed to one of my transit providers.
> 
> I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work. 
> 
>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:43 PM Siyuan Miao  wrote:
>> They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(
>> 
>>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel  
>>> wrote:
>>> Yes.
>>> 
>>> Ryan
>>> 
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: NANOG  On Behalf Of Rubens 
>>> Kuhl
>>> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
>>> To: Nanog 
>>> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>>> 
>>> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for 
>>> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>>> 
>>> Is that still the case a year later ?
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Rubens
>>> 


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-25 Thread Forrest Christian (List Account)
I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned from
a customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in half and announce them
that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX
peering session as opposed to one of my transit providers.

I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work.

On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:43 PM Siyuan Miao  wrote:

> They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel 
> wrote:
>
>> Yes.
>>
>> Ryan
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: NANOG  On Behalf Of
>> Rubens Kuhl
>> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
>> To: Nanog 
>> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>>
>> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for
>> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>>
>> Is that still the case a year later ?
>>
>>
>> Rubens
>>
>>


Re: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-24 Thread Siyuan Miao
They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(

On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel 
wrote:

> Yes.
>
> Ryan
>
> -Original Message-
> From: NANOG  On Behalf Of
> Rubens Kuhl
> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
> To: Nanog 
> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>
> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for
> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>
> Is that still the case a year later ?
>
>
> Rubens
>
>


RE: HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-24 Thread Ryan Hamel
Yes.

Ryan

-Original Message-
From: NANOG  On Behalf Of Rubens Kuhl
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
To: Nanog 
Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities

The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for traffic 
engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.

Is that still the case a year later ?


Rubens



HE.net and BGP Communities

2022-07-24 Thread Rubens Kuhl
The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for
traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.

Is that still the case a year later ?


Rubens