[ppml] Deaggregation in the ARIN region Was: [nanog] The Cidr Report

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Sun, Feb 13, 2005 at 09:41:28AM -0800, Andrew Dul wrote:
> I was wondering if people in the ARIN region agreed with these statements
> about the ARIN region not doing enough to educate the membership about
> deaggregation, BGP annoucements etc...

I guess I question if there is an education problem.  For all the
complaining on the NANOG mailing list I've never seen something
more than, well complaining.

You can split the issues into several categories, and I don't know
how ARIN can help with any of them.  First, in many cases no one
can bother to contact the offending party.  Obviously their own
upstream is a prime candidate to notice and contact the person in
question.  If we can't get the major ISP's who have a clue, and
have staff, and know the issues to make it a priority to contact
the smaller players and help them along then I don't know what hope
we have for some outside influence to make a difference.

Second, when contacted, one of two things happen.  The parties often
clean up their act simply by someone asking (the, "oops, I didn't
know I was doing that" situation).  In the other cases, the response
is often "I have a reason to do this and I'm not explaining it to
you."  I suppose ARIN might be able to do something in the former
case although I question if it is appropriate.  In the latter case,
unless the industry as a whole takes a much stronger stance and
imposes sanctions (eg, route filtering) then no one complaining
will make a difference.

Third, and most important, does anyone care?  We're not at a stage
anymore where the routers are on the verge of falling over.  Other
than a few complainers, it's not clear this issue impacts the day
to day operation of anyone's network in a significant way.  Obviously
there is the potential, if it gets worse it could get real bad real
quick.  There seems to be a level of tolerance for slop in the
system right now, and that's probably a good thing.

So, I too question if ARIN is the right place.  However, if anyone
is going to take action on this I think it needs to be documented
not only that this is occurring (which is easy, from the CIDR report)
but that the existing mechanisms don't work (contacting the party,
contacting their upstream), and that as a result of them not working
there is a danger to the system.

While minizing the table is a good engineering practice, there are
reasons to de-aggregate.  Several providers have been forced to do
it during the past few years merger sprees on a temporary basis to
aid in transition.  We don't want to be so rigid that they would
be precluded from de-aggregating for a few months to make for a
smoother transition when there are resources available.  Forcing
more complicated transitions may actually lead to greater Internet
instability.

There are obviously people simply ignorant of the issue and de-aggregating
for no reason, but those are also people unlikely to reach out for
any help out of ignorance or apathy.  To reach those people will
require a proactive effort.  Since ARIN does not actively manage
the routing table, it seems likely they are best to be proactive
about what is in the routing table.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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