[ncc-services-wg] dnsmon - why?

Randy,

> at some ripe meeting or another, i presented a bit of research.  in that
> research, we conducted an experiment using some "BGP Beacons." within
> weeks, ripe/ncc had set up a bunch of these beacons,

You were one of the people asking for this, quoting from the minutes of
the Rhodos meeting:

 <quote>
  Minutes Routing WG at RIPE43 [...]

  C. Route Flap Damping: Harmful? (Randy Bush) [...]

  Route flap damping parameters may have to be revised, but
  more data are needed; Randy asks for help, need more
  BGP beacons installed.
 </quote>

> in a fashion that was not usable for our experiments

There are, at the moment, 5 beacons (or sets of beacons) worldwide.  All 5
are set up slightly differently, and thus show different behavior, that
may or may not make them suitable for your specific experiment. And in the
paper you submitted to IMW2003, you even question yourself whether the NCC
beacon data is suitable for your studies or not.

Then, our beacon setup has been published but is in no way cast in stone.
If you want us to make chances, tell us WHAT you want changed.

In fact, this is already about to happen, we are currently discussing
changes in the beacon pattern with one of the co-authors of the 2 papers
mentioned above, including a pattern that can only be done with the RIS.

> and with no clear goal other than <aol>ME TOO</AOL>.

Besides responding to the question raised by you, we spoke to several BGP
experts afterwards, and all seemed to agree that this was a good idea, so
we did it.

And before anybody complains that all this cost money, the beacons come
essentially for free with the RIS infrastructure, setting them up was half
an afternoon of work for 1 engineer, maintaining them is a matter of
minutes per week.


> to my knowledge, no researcher has used them to date.

You are wrong here, 1 thesis has been published about the data

  http://www.net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~sara/thesis/

and I know for a fact that 2 papers to be submitted to refereed
conferences are in the works.

Henk

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That problem that we weren't having yesterday, is it better? (Big ISP NOC)