Re: DRAFT 2.0 of Route-Flap Dampening Paper, last call for comments

["Christian Panigl, ACOnet/UniVie" <]

>Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 21:02:14 -0500 (EST)
>From: Andrew Partan asp@localhost
>
>Can someone spell out a bit more the reason behind exempting the
>routes that the root servers live in from being damped?  Why should
>they get special treatment?  And why just them (and the rest of
>the hosts that happen to live in those prefixes)?
>
>There are a lot of root servers; if you can't reach some of them,
>so what?

    Hi Andrew,
    
    we've been through this a couple of times.  You are perfectly right,
    that, at least in principle, there should be enough redundancy for root
    nameservers.  Though, in fact we are still facing a situation where, at
    least outside USA, large parts of the Internet are seeing all of them
    through the same one or two backbone/upstream links (sea cable) and any
    instability of those links which is triggering damping would
    unnecessarily prolong the inaccessibility of the root nameservers for an
    hour (at least those sitting in a /24 or longer prefix).  Therefore we
    decided to define those "golden networks".  Probably we could remove the
    exemptions for the A, D and H servers, which are sitting in a /16.  We
    might consider this for a new version of the recommendation.  Our
    recommendation is just dealing with a minimum set of "golden networks"
    which of course might be extended by local decision.
    
    I'm now finishing the Version 1.0 of the paper, considering all other
    comments received so far.  Any further input is still welcome and will
    be considered for an updated version which, if needed, may be expected
    for autumn this year.
    
    Kind regards
    CP
    
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