[ppml] Policy Proposal 2005-1: Provider-independent IPv6 Assignments for End Sites - Last Call

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

I completely agree with what Vince said.

On 17-apr-2006, at 7:06, Randy Bush wrote:

>> Few people realize or remember how close the Internet routing
>> system came to collapse during the pre-CIDR days...

> i don't think sean thought it was merely close.  large portions
> of the net were in *serious* failure modes.

Well, if you put it like this... It's not that bad today but we're  
not entirely failure mode free either. If you buy good C or J gear  
(which starts at around $10k) you're not going to have problems  
today. But below that price point, life is a lot harder. You can  
either go with a Linux or BSD box with something like Zebra/Quagga,  
which is about an order of magnitude less reliable and can only  
forward so many packets per second, or you can go with a multilayer  
switch that can forward packets on many gigabit ports at line rate,  
but those don't run BGP quite as well as the aforementioned C or J  
boxes.

For instance, a couple of years ago I ran into trouble with an  
Extreme Summit router/switch connected to a large exchange point. It  
had two or three full BGP feeds and close to 100 peering BGP  
sessions. Worked like a charm, until at one point something failed, I  
forget what. But due to that failure, a bunch of BGP sessions  
flapped: they went down and came back up again. This was enough to  
get the box into an unstable state where sessions would go down, come  
back up, go down again and so on. This would persist for about 30 -  
60 minutes after which everything would become stable again.

For the record: Extreme is not a fly-by-night operation. They make  
excellent switches and they have some very capable people working on  
their products. However, presumably they can't invest the massive  
amounts of work into BGP that Cisco and Juniper can.

I think this story illustrates that large routing tables are  
suboptimal even today. Even without the internet as a whole melting  
down, a large routing table makes life hard for smaller players that  
now have a much harder time affording routers that can do full BGP  
than 5 or 10 years ago.