abilene -> he.net routing humor

[Daniel Roesen]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 07:37:07PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> >So either Abilene shuts down the transits taken from KREONET2 and APAN
> 
> Right. They can't have it both ways. Either they accept the fact that  
> they do provide transit and start working on improvements, or they  
> implement their policy and cut off all forms of de facto transit.

Correct. That's how I see it too.

> >and thus force all connected RENs to look for transit elsewhere, or
> >get at least one sane transit somewhere in the US instead. This would
> >fix the odd routing problems we observe every now and then.
> 
> If they accept that they provide transit for research networks  
> another option would be to start peering with important commercial  
> IPv6 transit providers.

Peering doesn't make much sense in the non-transit case, as this doesn't
buy the Abilene participants much. Those need to buy commercial transit
anyway, and then those commercial upstreams can sort out the "good
connectivity to the world" issue - that's what they are being paid for.

One IMHO sensible scenario for Abilene could be:

- hook up to OCCAID (http://www.occaid.org/) and get transit there
- take only NREN peering routes from APAN/KREONET2, not full table
- announce only Abilene participant routes to APAN/KREONET2
- ask APAN/KREONET2 to not leak Abilene routes to any non-REN network

Abilene participants can then choose to use the OCCAID transit via
Abilene, or alternatively if that doesn't meet their requirements
(anymore), buy their own commercial transit.

That would accomplish three goals at once:

- get rid of the routing problems induced by the APAN/KREONET2 route
  swaps

- have a sane transit (OCCAID) who actually localprefs and otherwise
  would handle Abilene routes as _customer_ (downstream) routes

- provide sane free transit to Abilene and their direct participants
  as "bootstrap connectivity" to replace the APAN/KREONET2
  pseudo-transit

==> Abilene would leave the state of "reachable if you're lucky" and
    become part of the production quality IPv6 Internet.


Best regards,
Daniel

-- 
CLUE-RIPE -- Jabber: dr at cluenet.de -- dr at IRCnet -- PGP: 0xA85C8AA0