Large global enterprises, multi-homing, and inconsistent announcements

[Brian E Carpenter]

Craig,

You are right on that until the IETF multi6 group reaches some conclusions
on short and long term IPv6 multihoming, we can't get final answers
in this space. But meanwhile, my hypothetical large company is going to want
to protect itself by getting a nice short provider-independent prefix.

Doesn't this sound horribly familiar?

   Brian

"Craig A. Huegen" wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Richard Jimmerson wrote:
> 
> > It is ARIN's understanding that the community prefers ARIN not become
> > involved in establishing global routing guidelines.  Does this continue to
> > be true with IPv6?
> 
> The reason I bring this up is because regardless of whether it's desirable
> or not, service providers today are basing their v4 routing filters upon
> allocation size.  Address space in 64/8 is much more flexible from the
> perspective of an end user's ability to divide the block into regional
> chunks, compared with 128/2 space.  Cisco ran into this in the past year
> where, in an attempt to efficiently use the space granted to us over the
> years, we wanted to announce portions of 163.213.0.0/16 as 4 sub-blocks,
> each from one of our access points within the Asia-Pacific theatre.  This
> would have resulted in a handful of providers not accepting the
> announcements.
> 
> We had two choices:
> 
> * we could contact those providers we knew that filtered, and ask them to
>   make exceptions for us.  Some of them refused, citing their legal
>   departments would not let them make the necessary exceptions.  The other
>   issue with this approach is that it's impossible to find out, except
>   through a reactive approach, which providers are filtering and then make
>   the necessary contacts to allow the blocks through; or,
> * we could renumber into another block.  We did this, taking on
>   significant expense to renumber into a like-size block that wasn't as
>   tightly filtered.
> 
> I believe that through the adoption of the IAB/IESG recommendations, ARIN
> is affirming some of the concepts that pertain to routing.  Whether or not
> it's believed that ARIN should be involved in establishing them, it's
> happening as the guidelines exist today.
> 
> Perhaps this could wait until the whole debacle surrounding multihoming
> settles; I recognize that it may drive some of the decisions made
> regarding these large enterprise networks.  Until some of those decisions
> are made, any planning that's done by these enterprises (and therefore,
> later: adoption) is going to be a dartboard throw.  It's harder to justify
> within many of these enterprises.
> 
> /cah
> 
> ---
> Craig A. Huegen  CCIE #2100                       C i s c o  S y s t e m s
> Sr Network Architect, GCTS                              ||        ||
> Cisco Systems, Inc., 400 East Tasman Drive              ||        ||
> San Jose, CA  95134, (408) 526-8104                    ||||      ||||
> email: chuegen at cisco.com                           ..:||||||:..:||||||:..