I'm sitting in the RIPE meeting in Berlin. So far there has been a couple of interesting presentations related to route scaling.
Paul Francis made a presentation about how ISPs can configure their (existing) routers to reduce the amount of FIB entries, and hopefully with the extra configuration effort, buy some more time for the use of their routers. The idea is based on partitioning the address space into parts, assigning specific routers to deal with specific parts of the address space, and using MPLS route traffic through the rest network. The paper is here: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/francis/va-wp.pdf and the presentation here: http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Monday/Plenary%2016:00/upl/Karrenberg-IPv4_Prefix_Lengths.LGnt.pdf This might be useful in terms of thinking about operational practices that help ISPs cope with the route scalability problem. Not a long term solution perhaps, but something that lets you live while an eventual solution is being deployed. I'm sure there's other similar practices that could be employed. Outside the charter of the RRG, of course, but maybe useful work anyway. Daniel Karrenberg and few others talked about routing table fragmentation and why so many entries are /24s. His data points to the direction that a big fraction of the advertised /24s are from de-aggregations of bigger allocations. Obviously there are many reasons for this, including traffic engineering, multihoming, etc. However, at least for me it was news that one possible reason for doing this would be to "protect" yourself against prefix hijacking. By advertising /24s you reduce the likelihood of being hijacked with a more specific route. If true, one action that needs to be taken to reduce routing scalability problem is to secure the system in some proper way. Here are the presentations: http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Monday/Plenary%2016:00/upl/Karrenberg-IPv4_Prefix_Lengths.LGnt.pdf http://rosie.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-56/presentations/uploads/Tuesday/Plenary%2014:00/upl/Karrenberg-Response_to_Prefix_Length_Question_from_Yesterday.xXAg.png Have people here actually seen such "protection" as a reason for someone to de-aggregate their prefixes? Jari -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
