Re: A couple of possibly interesting stats.

[Dennis Ferguson <]

> Any network provider which is using multiple ANS/NSFNET connections to split
> load should have an addressing plan that assigns a different aggregate to each
> exit point. The basic rule is: for each routing policy you have, you should
> have different CIDR block. I thought we'd been over this in at least the
> Regional Techs forum before.

I have actually been aiming towards supporting having one's cake and eating
it too, with route colouring.  That is, a neighbour who wanted to split their
load between several direct gateways, but who also wanted to advertise
a provider aggregate, would advertise the aggregate route plus enough
more specific routes to get us to the correct gateway.  We would colour
the more specific routes not to be advertised to anyone else, so only
the aggregate route would be propagated elsewhere.  This isn't quite
done yet, but it is being worked on.

This assumes, of course, that everyone else pulls enough routes out
that we have the luxury of forwarding table space to support this.  I
suspect a 32M RS/6000 can carry a bigger routing load than a 16M cisco
but not a whole lot more, so if we get to the point where 16M ciscos
are crashing-and-burning more frequently we'll also be looking for ways
to shed routing load.  I think we're getting perilously close to a
time when there will be no time to experiment with this stuff, it'll
be do, or die, or make your router vendors very wealthy ordering
upgrades.

In fact the way things are going I sort of wish I'd found a job with
a router vendor rather than an operator.

Dennis Ferguson