NSP ... New Information

>proteon, ibm, cisco, bay, 3com to name a few,
>and, to my limited understanding, every implementation
>of an IP stack. Of course if you are willing to slow down
>everything and commit to a global network that runs at
>no greater than 64Kb. (and get everyone else to do the same)
>then you might be able to get by with the next generation of
>hardware.
>
>--bill

One of the newbies (Livingston) has BGP in alpha using < 8MB for a full
view and a 486 processor without stress. While this won't make a core
router, it seems to offer something to consider, even learn from.

  Livingston has serious problems with its BGP code and
  has since it was first available (going on six months now)
  Your analogy breaks down pretty quick. Sort of like the
  doit yourselfer electrician tinkering with the hoover dam
  generators. Heck, its all just volts and amps and what works
  at my house will work at the colocation point for millions
  of users.... not.

The original vendor
does not always produce sacrosanct stuff.

  True enough. Feel free to enlighten the rest of us with your code.
  I expect that you might even be able to make a buck or two out of
  it.

We just went through the process of acquiring our first significant router;
one of our main concerns was a router which would allow school districts,
libraries and hospitals to benefit from Texas HB2128, which offers distance
insensitive T1s and DS3s and was co-authored by our telecomm lobbyist, W.
Scott McCollough in Austin.

  Woopdedo. I spent 18 years in Texas fighting the same fight.

I was somewhat dismayed at the memory limitations of current stuff compared
to what I was hearing about the memory requirements. Jonah has more memory
on his texas.net usenet news server than you can put on many core routers.

  True. Whats your point? Memory is not the answer.

Is there anyone working on alternative implementations of software which
could possibly solve some of the problems using extant hardware?

  Sure. See the latest from the new router startups and the next round
  from the old guard.

Will IP multicast help with the usenet stuff?

  Tangental question.

Do we want to continue seeing cams at universities display the local tower
while the institution doesn't meet RFC2050 guidelines with respect to
utilization of their Class B while the rural areas can't get /19s to
support diversity and redundancy?

  If you got your address space pre-RFC2050, do its guidelines
  apply to you? I expect that once they come back for more space
  that RFC2050 will apply.

Does Congress need to pass "must carry" legislation similar to the "any
willing provider" medical legislation? IMHO, it would be better that some
old dogmas and implementations die and be replaced with efficient, robust
code and a rather less limiting view of the future.

  Sure. As soon as they pass the legislation mandating PI = 3.0
  Oh, and we are still waiting on your "efficient, robust code".
  T'would be a shame to legislate away a working system w/o your
  replacement code in place.

bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland

  Until you kill it off with legal manouvers.

Do you REALLY consider:

1) fighting for equal access to PRIs for rural Texas and
2) fighting for email privacy by standing up to the Texas Attorney General
and supporting the law of the land (ECPA)

as "legal manouvers (sic)".

Surely you jest?

Larry Vaden, founder and CEO help-desk 903-813-4500
Internet Texoma, Inc. <http://www.texoma.net> direct 903-870-0365
bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland fax 903-868-8551
Member ISP/C, TISPA and USIPA pager 903-867-6571

What is the current utilization rate of USC's block? Will they ever have
to go back or meet current guidelines?

Larry Vaden, founder and CEO help-desk 903-813-4500
Internet Texoma, Inc. <http://www.texoma.net> direct 903-870-0365
bringing the real Internet to rural Texomaland fax 903-868-8551
Member ISP/C, TISPA and USIPA pager 903-867-6571

bmanning@ISI.EDU writes:

  Livingston has serious problems with its BGP code and
  has since it was first available (going on six
      months now)

I don't suppose you'd care to elucidate?

I'd be curious about how many updates/second this box can
handle while forwarding across all interfaces at line
rate, and how quickly from the receipt of an update
switching to another path the forwarding engine begins
sending traffic along that path, and how many
christmas-tree packets flowing at line rates to a series
of changing destinations are lost or mis-forwarded.

Of course I tend to be interested in environments where
traffic is already enormously aggregated, where all or
nearly all the available bandwidth is being used,
where dozens of BGP updates/second is commonplace, and
where occasionally there will be "flutter" that causes
large numbers of prefixes to attract data down oscillating
paths.

These are difficult conditions for any router, and
unfortunately nobody seems to have a public benchmark
which tests for them, other than the "it works/it doesn't"
in the middle of large pieces of the Internet.

I would be interested in actual "it works/it doesn't"
commentary (and possible explanation of "it doesn't", if
that's the case) involving this particular router from
some sizeable ISP or other. Learning from vendor mistakes
is of use to many of us.

> Will IP multicast help with the usenet stuff?

  Tangental question.

Kurt Lidl and company's excellent MUSE paper, presented at
USENIX in Winter 1994 details early attempts to distribute
news via the MBONE.

Unfortunately the MBONE is not IP multicast in any
serviceable or saleable sense, and that and the
work involved in making it difficult to forge multicast
USENET news tends to make the distribution of news slower
and less reliable than the parallel interactive unicast
scheme.

On the other hand, as there has been a great deal of work
on eliminating multiple MBONE tunnels across providers,
this both could be less true and less important for people
who are concerned about the number of copies of articles
moving across their networks.

On yet another hand, it might make sense for "proper"
multicast facilities to be deployed as supportable
products before jumping into doing MUSE or something like
it in a serious way.

On yet another hand, satellite dissemination of news, both
with pagesat-style distribution and sniffing at satellite
point-to-point transmissions using amusing tcpdump scripts or
programs directly using the berkeley packet filter, have
been happening for some time.

On the final hand, NNTP distribution is much less broken
than Web distribution, and the latter distribution problem
probably deserves to be attacked first.

Oh yah, out of curiosity, what native multicast support is
in the Livingston box, and what does it use for routing?
PIM? DVMRP? CBT?

  Sean.

> Livingston has serious problems with its BGP code and
> has since it was first available (going on six
> months now)

Huh... Uhh I am not aware of this..

I'd be curious about how many updates/second this box can
handle while forwarding across all interfaces at line
rate, and how quickly from the receipt of an update
switching to another path the forwarding engine begins
sending traffic along that path, and how many
christmas-tree packets flowing at line rates to a series
of changing destinations are lost or mis-forwarded.

Well I know that on the IRX platform the router is not fast enough to
deal with light ammounts of updates with 5 or 6 sessions and still
forward packets.. I am told the on the PM3's that is handles it just
fine..

The IRX is old 3 years or so 386DX-40 based where the PM3 is 486/66

For instance when we reset a IBGP session when the session
establishes when loading the routes (15-20k) it will stop forwarding
for 5-10 sec.

I would be interested in actual "it works/it doesn't"
commentary (and possible explanation of "it doesn't", if
that's the case) involving this particular router from
some sizeable ISP or other. Learning from vendor mistakes
is of use to many of us.

It works.. I am very happy with it.. On the IRX platform it is not
ment as a backbone router but for customer connections it works
great. We have a few of them that are not accepting BGP routes but
are anouncing customer routes.. It seems to work real well. I hope to
get a PM3 in here to find out how well it works.. If the performance
is as good as I have heard and the fact that I can fit 6-8 full views
in 16 MB of ram... we might have a winner for some of our smaller
POP's..

Plus where space is not a big problem the IRX is a great price for a
2 T1 2 56k port router for customer connects..

<Whole bunch of Multicast USENET stuff cut>