Sunday, October 23, 2005

Some thoughts post Level3 Internet fallout

One of j2's BGP peers is Level3 so I know first hand some of the issues that went along with their serious outage issues on late Thursday early Friday morning of this last week. We also peer with InterNAP (excellent service and very knowledgeable BGP engineers) and I must say we have been very happy with InterNAP. My biggest concern with the Level3 outage was how slow Level3's network was at withdrawing routes. If you read the NANOG mailing lists you will see countless tales of folks taking down their BGP sessions with Level3 only to find that their network was so messed up that they couldn't get the routes to stop advertising through Level3. That's a huge problem and something that should be addressed. For those of us that are multihomed and diverse there should be high expectations that we can minimize that impact of such a large problem. I also wonder if IPv6 would have done any better in this situation. Honestly, I don't know.
- Ed

No comments: