On Fri, May 17, 2019, at 15:28, Blake Hudson wrote:

>  From my perspective one's ability to intelligently route IP traffic is 
> directly correlated to the data they have available (their routing 
> protocol and table). For example, with static default routes one can 

For me, routing table and available routing protocols are not the only things 
needed for intelligent routing. And the router is not the only component 
involved in "intelligent routing". Not these days/not anymore.

One thing that can help immensely in an internet environment is knowing where 
the data goes and where it comes from. Knowing your "important" traffic 
source/destinations is part of it.

You can say "I can no longer keep all the routes in FIB, so I'll drop the 
/24s", then come to a conclusion that that you have loads of traffic towards an 
anycast node located in a /24 or that you exchange voice with a VoIP provider 
that announces /24. you just lost the ability to do something proper with your 
important destination. On the other hand, you may easily leave via default (in 
extreme cases even drop) traffic to several /16s from Mulgazanzar Telecom which 
which you barely exchange a few packets per day except the quarterly wave of 
DDoS/spam/scans/[name your favorite abuse]. Or you may just drop a few hundred 
more-specific routes for a destination that you do care about, but you cannot 
do much because network-wise it is too far away.

Of course, such an approach involves human intervention, either for selecting 
the important and non-important destinations or for writing the code that does 
it automagically. Or both. There is no magic potion. (as a friday afternoon 
remark, there used to be such a potion in France, the "green powder", but they 
permanently ran out of stock in 2004 - see http://poudreverte.org/ - site in 
fr_FR).

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