On the call today the question was raised as to where one should publish, and correspondingly where one can find, route policy information for a given network. I believe it was Warrick that mentioned the (historical) utility of traceroute.org as an example.
At least for commercial peers here in the US, the use of peeringdb.com is probably the default interface used today for peering coordination. I would claim that it would be of significant utility to R&E networks for coordination as well.
From there one can find relevant information such as: - URL to a Peering Policy web page w/ additional details - URL links to looking glasses (if applicable) - additional details in the notes field
For the more specific case of bgp community support, at present this is still free-form text that has to go somewhere, but it's not always clear where to look.
To pick on my friend Warrick, you can find a good example at: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/393 Though perhaps in the notes field Warrick could say, "You can find supported bgp communities near the bottom of our magnificent 1,174 line aut-num record in RADB"
Or for us at https://www.peeringdb.com/net/940 Perhaps we should add something to the tune of, "You can find our supported traffic engineering bgp communities at /dev/null, best of luck! But note for LHCONE VRF peers, we do support the mandatory knobs at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/LHCONE/LhcOneVRF#BGP_communities"
Dale
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All,
I can totally second the usage of peeringDB which is the tool of preference for us (SURF) to get information a network (we we'll likely integrate this with our automation workflows). We also do publish some info in the RIPE database (https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/query?searchtext=as-surfnet, which shows which ASes we provide transit for) or (https://apps.db.ripe.net/db-web-ui/query?bflag=false&dflag=false&rfl... which shows with which networks we peer and what we send or accept from them, this object is uh not up to date....)
However neither of those two provide the information we need here, we need to make conscious decisions which network to prefer. Right now for the SURF ==> Kenia example we make the wrong decision. Below one of our three border routers (this box has direct peerings with Internet2/GEANT/Nordunet/AMS-IX/NL-IX/SpeedIX/Asteroid and transit, redundant or backup peers with Internet2/GEANT/Nordunet/exchanges/transit reside on the others)
In our peering policy we (SURF/AS1103) prefer to send traffic to customers directly, followed by research networks (local pref 300), private peers (local pref 160, metric 10), exchanges (local pref 160 metirc 20-60), transit (local pref 150/130). We prefer path via other research networks since in generall thay have higher capacity than via exchanges/transit.
In this example option 1, 2, 3, 4 fall in the same category research peers, with an equal AS-path length (3 AS’es). The battle is on between route 1, 2 and 3 (route 4 GEANT backup will loose from the GEANT primary due to set metrics). Since there is no direct tie breaker and we use JunOS (see https://www.juniper.net/documentation/en_US/junos/topics/reference/general/r...) it is step 11, that does it so the route with the longest route-age wins for stability. The quick and dirty work-a-round flap both Internet2 peerings and we switch back to GEANT. Route 5 is for us a pure exchange route (despite coming from Unbuntunet alliance for research and education networking), they have some presence in Amsterdam with interntional links and hence also connect to the AMS-IX. Route 6 and 7 fall in our transit category and are really last resort as they are over metered connections.
Of course as a human we can figure out a path via GEANT is probably far better than crossing the Atlantic ocean twice via Internet2. The question how do we get this information into our routers. I don’t see it to create manual exceptions in our routing policy for every weird route we find, this is something that will not scale. What I need is information that depicts the origin of this route something like Africa or maybe even a specific country, combined with the knowledge GEANT as a network is much closer to Africa than Internet2 it would make sense to prefer them.
My proposal if we could come to a common set of BGP communities we add to our routes that depict continents or countries we can then figure out with knowledge of the various networks which path between them is better. I would assume GEANT is able to offer us better routes to European, African and Asian research networks over Internet2. Where Internet2 probably has much better connectivity to north American and likely south American networks. If we could get geographic info in routing advertisements by communities (preferably a common set), we would know the route to Kenia via GEANT is better than Internet2.
Pieter
ps yesterdays talk was really interesting, nice visualization with Netsage and good discussions.
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SURFnet is transitioning towards SURF, my e-mail adres has changed accordingly pieter.deboer@surfnet.nl got pieter.deboer@surf.nl
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Dale W. Carder -
Pieter de Boer