[c-nsp] BGP peer/customer routes

[Mark Tinka]

On Wednesday, June 01, 2011 02:31:45 AM vince anton wrote:

> it surprises me that some people seem to be ok with
> passing transit traffic over a peering link. I dont
> understand why you would want to do this, as to me this
> seems abuse or misconfiguration (possibly not
> intentional), and potentially very expensive, or loss of
> revenue.

It certainly is cheaper than moving that traffic via your 
upstreams :-). But seriously...

Do I condone it, no. My point was, your customers will do 
strange things while you're asleep, while you're away on 
vacation, e.t.c. You can't always obviously catch the 
badness your customers are doing, especially if the amount 
of traffic that's affected is small. Over time, you can 
devise tools and ways to detect this kind of nonsense 
sooner, quicker.

So my message is your policy should be to always pass your 
customer's traffic across their transit link with you. It's 
good for you. But it may not be good for your customer if 
they're multi-homed, or whatever, and this is where things 
get hairy. Work out what you can do in case your customer 
decides to have you forward him his traffic via your 
upstream or exchange point while you're asleep, in the 
short-term; then work out what your plan is in the long-
term.

Some of these solutions could be achieved via routing 
policy. Some couldn't.

> the reason I asked the list for feedback on what is
> considered good/general practise in this case, is that I
> would like as much as possible to have considered all
> possible scenarios while building my routing/p-eering
> policy, and avoid re-inventing the wheel with the risk
> of ending up with something square instead of round !
> 
> and of course telling your peer/customer your policy from
> the start is usually, well, good policy :)

It's hard to think about everything, because customers 
surprise you all the time, e.g., customer turns up at an 
exchange point and asks you for peering, especially if your 
government funds the exchange point and mandates that all 
licensees peer with everyone. What would you do in such a 
scenario?

I hope you get my drift.

Mark.
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