On Jan 5, 2023, at 1:11 PM, Mike Hammett <na...@ics-il.net> wrote:
I hesitated to get too specific in examples because someone is going
to drag the conversation into the weeds.
Let's take the the Dallas - New Orleans - Atlanta example where I
have a connection from New Orleans to Dallas and a connection from
New Orleans to Atlanta.
Let's say I peer with Netflix in both markets. Netflix chooses to
serve me out of Atlanta, for whatever reason. Say my default route
sends my traffic to Dallas. That's not where Netflix wanted it, so
now I have to go from Dallas to Atlanta, whether that's my circuit or
across the public Internet. Potentially, it's on MPLS and it rides
back through the New Orleans router to get back to Atlanta. That's a
long trip when I already had a better path, the less-than-full-fib
router just didn't know about it. Given that Netflix is a sizable
amount of traffic in an eyeball ISP, that's a lot of traffic to be
going the wrong way. If the website for Viktor's Arctic Plunge in
Siberia was hosted in Atlanta, I wouldn't give two craps that the
traffic went the wrong way because A), I'll probably never go there
and B) when someone does, it won't be meaningfully enough traffic to
accommodate.
Someone's going to tell me to put a full-table router in New Orleans.
Maybe I should. Okay, so maybe I have a POP in Ashford, Alabama. It
has transport to New Orleans and Atlanta. There aren't enough grains
of sugar in Ashford, Alabama to justify a current-generation, full
table router. Now I'm even closer to Atlanta, but default may point
to New Orleans.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Mel Beckman" <m...@beckman.org>
*To: *"Mike Hammett" <na...@ics-il.net>
*Cc: *"Joe Maimon" <jmai...@jmaimon.com>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
*Sent: *Thursday, January 5, 2023 2:54:27 PM
*Subject: *Re: SDN Internet Router (sir)
Mike,
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “suboptimal“ routing. Even
though the Internet uses AS path length for routing, many of those
path lengths are bogus, and don’t really represent any kind of path
performance value. For example, a single AS might hide many hops in
an MPLS network as a single hop, obscuring asymmetric routing and
other uglies. Prepending also occurs when destinations are trying to
enforce their own engineering policies, which often conflict with
yours or mine.
So what do you mean by “suboptimal“? Are you thinking that the “best”
path in BGP tables actually meant you were getting a performance
benefit? Because that’s definitely not the case in today’s Internet.
Were were you thinking that you would be going along less congested
paths? That’s really at the mercy of the traffic engineering of
backbone providers over which we have no control.
I generally populate local router FIBs to merel choose an exit point
for purposes of load balancing, and nothing more.
-mel
On Jan 5, 2023, at 12:38 PM, Mike Hammett <na...@ics-il.net> wrote:
I guess I wasn't around for those days.
As far as running out, again, assuming the tooling works
correctly, I'd think to target fewer routes than you could hold.
Maybe 1k routes is all one would need to get a significant
percent of the traffic. A lot of room to mess up if you can hold
100k, 500k routes.
-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
<https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: *"Joe Maimon" <jmai...@jmaimon.com>
*To: *"Mike Hammett" <na...@ics-il.net>, "Christopher Morrow"
<morrowc.li...@gmail.com>
*Cc: *"NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
*Sent: *Thursday, January 5, 2023 2:30:40 PM
*Subject: *Re: SDN Internet Router (sir)
Mike Hammett wrote:
> I'm not concerned with which technology or buzzword gets the
job done,
> only that the job is done.
>
>
>
> Looking briefly at the couple of things out there, they're
evaluating
> the top X prefixes in terms of traffic reported by s-flow,
where X is
> the number I define, and those get pushed into the FIB. One
> recalculates every hour, one does so more quickly. How much is
> appropriate? I'm not sure. I can't imagine it would *NEED* to
be done
> all of that often, given the traffic/prefix density an eyeball
network
> will have. Default routes carry the rest. Default routes could be
> handled outside of this process, such that if this process
fails, you
> just get some sub-optimal routing until repaired. Maybe it doesn't
> filter properly and sends a bunch of routes. Then just have a
prefix
> limit set on the box. Maybe it sends the wrong prefixes. No
harm, no
> foul. If you're routing sub-optimally internally, when it does
hit a
> real router with a full FIB, it gets handled appropriately.
Unless it loops.
The rest sounds nice. But flow caching got a bad rap back in the
early
worm days. But thats because the situation was a little worse
back then.
Cache the wrong routes or run out of cache, router dies. So long as
thats not the case automating optimization is an extremely
valuable goal.
>
>
> I would just be looking for solutions that influence what's in
the FIB
> and let the rest of the router work as the rest of the router
would.
The problem comes when the router wont work at all without the FIB
routes, like in the olden days.
>
>
>
> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>
<https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>
<https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>
<https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From: *"Christopher Morrow" <morrowc.li...@gmail.com>
> *To: *"Mike Hammett" <na...@ics-il.net>
> *Cc: *"Tom Beecher" <beec...@beecher.cc>, "NANOG" <nanog@nanog.org>
> *Sent: *Thursday, January 5, 2023 12:27:08 PM
> *Subject: *Re: SDN Internet Router (sir)
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2023 at 11:18 AM Mike Hammett <na...@ics-il.net
> <mailto:na...@ics-il.net>> wrote:
>
> Initially, my thought was to use community filtering to
push just
> IXes, customers, and defaults throughout the network, but
that's
> obviously still sub-optimal.
>
> I'd be surprised if a last mile network had a ton of
traffic going
> to any more than a few hundred prefixes.
>
>
> I think in a low-fib box at the edge of your network your
choices are:
> "the easy choice, get default, follow that"
>
> "send some limited set of prefixes to the device, and
default, so
> you MAY choose better for the initial hop away"
>
> you certainly can do the second with communities, or route-filters
> (prefix-list) on the senders, or....
> you can choose what prefixes make the cut (get the community(ies))
> based on traffic volumes or expected destination locality:
> "do not go east to go west!"
>
> these things will introduce toil and SOME suboptimal routing in
some
> instances... perhaps it's better than per flow choosing left/right
> though and the support calls related to that choice.
>
> In your NOLA / DFW / ATL example it's totally possible that the
> networks in question do something like:
> "low fib box in tier-2 city (NOLA), dfz capable/core devices in
> tier-1 city (DFW/ATL), and send default from left/right to NOLA"
>
> Could they send more prefixes than default? sure... do they
want to
> deal with the toil that induces? (probably not says your example).
>
> SDN isn't really an answer to this, though.. I don't think.
Unless you
> envision that to lower the toil ?
>
