Hi, I'm Iljitsch van Beijnum. This page has all posts about all subjects.
The Computer Science and Engineering Department of the University of Washington is doing a study on BGP misconfiguration, which resulted in the paper Underst anding BGP Misconfiguration (postscript). The conclusion of this paper is that there is a lot of misconfiguration going on (200 to 1200 prefixes are affected each day), and it's not always human error.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-26
During the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies in March 2002, Geoff Huston presented An Examination of the Internet's BGP Table Behaviour in 2001. It seems the growth in the routing table slowed down considerably to 8%. The two previous years saw a 55% growth rate.
Yes, it took the news some time to reach BGPexpert. There are some other interesting presentations available on the APRICOT 2002 web site as well.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-25
On August 15th, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a complaint against AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint and UUNET, asking for a court order to make those networks to block an MP3 web site operated in China. BGP is even mentioned on page 11 of the complaint.
This, and other recent RIAA initiatives such as their plans to hack MP3 swapper's PC's, has made the RIAA very unpopular on the NANOG list. The pros and cons of blocking RIAA and record label web sites were discussed at length.
When the offending web site went offline, the RIAA dropped the lawsuit. But I'm sure the net hasn't seen the last of the RIAA lawyers.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-21
On August 28th, AT&T had an outage in Chicago that affected a large part of their network. It took them two hours to fix this, and after this they released a fairly detailed description of what happened: network statements in the OSPF configuration of their backbone routers had been deleted by accident.
AT&T was praised by some on the NANOG list for their openness, but others were puzzled how a problem like this could have such wide spread repercussions. This evolved into a discussion about the merits of interior routing protocols. Alex Yuriev brought up the point that when IGPs fail, they do so in a very bad way, his conclusion being it's better to run without any. This led to some "static routing is stupid" remarks. However, it is possible to run a large network without an IGP and not rely on static routes. This should work as follows:
That way, you never talk (I)BGP with a router you're not directly connected to, so you don't need loopback routes to find BGP peers. Because of the next-hop-self on every session, you don't need "redistribute connected" either so you've eliminated the need for an IGP. Since the MED is increased at each hop, it functions exactly the same way as the OSPF or IS-IS cost and the shortest path is preferred.
Permalink - posted 2002-10-15
O'Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 2002. ISBN 0-596-00254-8
Iljitsch van Beijnum
(publisher) (Amazon) (Google preview)
In the first week of May, a message was posted on the NANOG list by someone who had a dispute with one of his ISPs. When it became obvious this dispute wasn't going to be resolved, the ISP wasn't content with no longer providing any service, but they also contacted the other ISP this network connected to, and asked them to stop routing the /22 out of their range the (ex-)customer was using. The second ISP complied and the customer network was cut off from the internet. (This all happened on a sunday afternoon, so it is likely there is more to the story than what was posted on the NANOG list.)
The surprising thing was that many people on the list didn't think this was a very unreasonable thing to do. It is generally accepted that a network using an ISP's address space should stop using these addresses when it no longer connects to that ISP, but in the cases I have been involved with there was always a reasonable time to renumber. Obviously depending on such a grace period is a very dangerous thing to do. You have been warned.
Permalink - posted 2002-06-30