Bad routes update

[Bob Fink]

Masaki,

At 01:53 PM 7/21/99 -0400, Masaki Hirabaru wrote:
>Hi. Bob and all,
>
>>> Regarding making the 6bone operationally robust, the current state of
>>> routing policy (or lack thereof) combined with some sites that often don't
>>> take adequate responsibility to configure and operate for reliable
>>> production operation, leaves the 6bone very difficult to use for any real
>>> production use.
>
>Do you really think enforcing the routing policy leads to
>hardening (solving the current routing issues)?  It will cut a
>couple of multi-homed sites to make the 6bone topology simple and
>decrease the number of routing table entries from ~200 to ~170 as
>well as other bogus routes by a few. But, I don't think it will
>help to improve the current state of routing reliability.
>
>Introducing the routing policy at each pTLA routers increases the
>complexity of 6bone routing (in configuration by hand).  Before
>practicing the complex routing policy (that may be called a
>real-world practice), don't we have a couple of things to do?
>
>1) Still a couple of pTLA sites are using the obsolete BGP4MP
>version incompatible to the RFC version of BGP4MP. The problems
>are that this is undocumented (since it's been obsolete) and that
>it can not be automatically detected. It would happen easily to
>configure the both sides with the different versions. A BGP
>session can be established, but the update formats are different.
>
>2) There are a lot of route flapping even within the valid pTLA
>space.  A long time ago, I tried to figure out the origins, but I
>gave up to continue it for all the occasions. It keeps happening.
>
>3) There are a couple of strange routes outside the 6bone pTLA
>space drafting over the 6bone. We could get it covered by
>imposing the routing policy rather than solving the real problem.
>

I agree with your points in general. Note that the Hardening draft covers
most of this in the context of requiring stable practice and good
operational support to be a pTLA. My worry is not in reducing routing table
entries at this stage of the 6bone, rather encouraging a discipline on the
6bone of good policy and good practice. 

If we agree in prinicpal on the draft, and each pTLA implements it in
general, with the goal of a production quality network, we will start to
identify (and force changes on) the unreliable pTLAs.

I believe that a quality production backbone environment is what we are
after now, with most of the testing occurring at sites. 

We have had little or no comment on Rob's Hardening draft to date, so I
would encourage everyone to read it, make comments and improvements to it
(to the list please).

	<http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ngtrans-harden-00.txt>


Bob