On Securing BGP
The US Federal Communications Commission recently asked for comments on securing Internet routing. While I worked on the responses offered by various organizations, I also put in my own response as an individual, which I’ve included below.
Hedge 127: FR Routing Update
The FR Routing project is a fully featured open-source routing stack, including BGP, OSPF, and IS-Is (among others), supported by a community including NVDIA, Orange, VMWare, and many others. On today’s episode of the Hedge, Tom Ammon and Russ White are joined by Donald Sharp, Alistair Woodman, and Quentin Young to update listeners on projects completed and underway in FR Routing.
Legal and Ethical Aspects of Privacy
My second post on privacy for network engineers is up over at Packet Pushers—
Hedge 126: George Michaelson on ISDN
ISDN, while an old technology, is still around in many parts of the world. When will it go away? George Michaelson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the end of ISDN. The conversation then veers into old networking technologies, and the importance of ISDN in setting the terms and ideas we use today—ISDN is one of the key technologies around which network engineers built their mental maps of how to build and maintain networks.
Hedge 125: Brooks Westbrook and DC Fabric Design
DC fabric design is more of an art than a science—a lot of factors come into play, such as future growth, lifecycle management, security, and costs. How can network engineers balance these various factors—how do they even know what questions to ask? Brooks Westrbook joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss three- and five-stage DC fabric design, OPEX, CAPEX, and other topics on this episode of the Hedge.
BGP Policies (Part 4)
At the most basic level, there are only three BGP policies: pushing traffic through a specific exit point; pulling traffic through a specific entry point; preventing a remote AS (more than one AS hop away) from transiting your AS to reach a specific destination. In this series I’m going to discuss different reasons for these kinds of policies, and different ways to implement them in interdomain BGP.
In this post, I’ll cover the first of a few ways to give surrounding autonomous systems a hint about where traffic should enter a network. Note this is one of the most vexing problems in BGP policy, so there will be a lot of notes across the next several posts about why some solutions don’t work all that well, or when they will and won’t work.
There are at least three reasons an operator may want to control the point at which traffic enters their network, including:
Hedge 124: Geoff Huston and the State of BGP
Another year of massive growth in the number and speed of connections to the global Internet—what is the impact on the global routing table? Goeff Huston joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to discuss the current state of the BGP table, the changes in the last several years, where things might go, and what all of this means. This is part two of a two-part episode.
BGP Policies (Part 3)
Assume AS65001 is some form of content provider, which means it offers some service such as bare metal compute, cloud services, search engines, social media, etc. Customers from AS65006 are connecting to its servers, located on the 100::/64 network, which generates a large amount of traffic returning to the customers. From the perspective of AS hops, it appears the path from AS65001 to AS65006 is the same length—if this is true, AS65001 does not have any reason to choose one path or another (given there is no measurable performance difference, as in the cases described above from AS65006’s perspective). However, the AS hop count does not accurately describe the geographic distances involved…
Hedge 123: Geoff Huston and the State of BGP
Another year of massive growth in the number and speed of connections to the global Internet—what is the impact on the global routing table? Goeff Huston joins Donald Sharp and Russ White to discuss the current state of the BGP table, the changes in the last several years, where things might go, and what all of this means. This is part one of a two-part episode.
