Slashdot Mirror
Is the Internet Shutting Out Independent Players?
"ISPs aren't advertizing routes for competing ISPs, and since IP blocks are heavily filtered upstream, this won't do much good anyway. The reasons for this are clear (Routing table growth was getting way out of hand), hence the introduction of CIDR ? , and the allocation of IPs to ISPs, with a resulting lockout on availability of routable IP space to individuals or smaller groups.
With the availabilty of IPv6, and the cost of RAM, I find it somewhat hard to believe that either IP address blocks are scarce, or that the size of routing tables are unmanageable any more. This might have been true with an 8MB Cisco 10 years ago, but surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices.
Obviously, IPV6 isn't really here yet, but i would like to think that when (if) it arrives, we will see a more open routing system.
Is anybody working on returning some kind of equal standing to 'the little guys' when it comes to internet routing infrastructure, and how a more 'open' system could work in practice on tomorrow's (or today's) internet?"
Having a multi-homed network is extremely stressful on the rest of the Internet, and you're going to have to pay for the privilege.
Yes, routers have gotten a lot more advanced, but if every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to have their own APNIC-assigned IP block, it is going to cost a lot of money for the backbone providers and everybody else to accomodate the routing tables. Unless you're big enough to make a reasonably large dent in their bottom lines, they aren't going to care about making you happy because it's just too damn expensive. (And guess who would wind up paying for your pleasure? Every user of consumer-grade connections, that's who.)
You should be quite satisfied that you can even get high-speed connectivity (not to mention, connectivity from multiple providers at once) where you're at. Here in the USA, the most technologically advanced society in the world, it's difficult if not impossible to get *any* high speed service outside a major metropolitan area. Before my cable monopoly upgraded its network, I couldn't get any service at all that wasn't long distance dialup.
My advice to you: count your blessings, and find a different way to solve the problem.
Just my 2c.
~wally
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
These methods and models of doling out IP addresses leave some of our internet data centres hopelessly inadequate at providing something as trivial as fault-tolerant links thru two or more ISPs within the same country as each ISP would refuse to route blocks belonging to other ISPs.
However, I dont think that arguing the increased RAM capacities of routers being capable of storing the huge routing tables is the answer.
CIDR and its ilk was developed to partly address huge routing tables, but the key point it addresses is propogation of new route changes which need to be sent to more routers and thus generating more traffic instead of being confined to just the edge (in context) routers as used now.
If the propogation of new and changed routes could be addressed without generating additional traffic, and believe me when I say bandwidth isnt cheap in Asia, then I would agree with utilizing larger RAM in routers to store these tables.
Incidentally, I was a couple of minutes short of FP. :)
Let's pretend you're APNIC. Now let's pretend you've got 100 million geeks clamoring for IP's. How much of your resources do you spend on customer-service and hand-holding before you throw up your hands in despair and start setting some limits?
Perzackly.
Now, consider the fact the Joe and Jane Geek have to have a connection to use those nice shiny new IP addresses. And you soon see why we have the present hierarchy of telco's and ISP's.
Not be to be blunt or anything, but hasn't it occured to you that eventually we will end up with a few major ISPs? We watched for years as small ISPs struggled and went out of business, while the large players sucked up the business.
Nope, I sure as hell not suprised we're going down this road. All this new policy will do is speed up the natural selection of companies until a few monster ISPs (probably run by an existing monster like AOL/Time Warner/Nullsoft) run everything.
Unfortunately, the very reasons you're eagerly awaiting IPv6 are probably the reasons that you won't ever see it, and you probably already know those reasons.
The Internet stopped being about information about five years ago (Or at least that wasn't the point anymore) and it's now all about eCommerce and BS like that. The very same companies that got on the Internet in the first place to deliver information are now delivering information only from their marketing departments, and not from engineers or researchers. Commerical interests have all but drowned out its original spirit, and are also partially the reason for the inception of Abilene (Internet2). Of course, it probably won't be long before that new promised land gets pillaged and raped. The Internet as we know it seems to be in an eternal state of loss of innocence, I'm afraid. I don't think the solution is to supplant or supercede the original 'net, but to just have a user-maintained network...kinda like what the network-area neighborhoods are designed to accomplish, except on a much grander scale. When the corporate interests don't exist, then the public can do with it as they see fit.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Someone tried selling me on a box that did that, except it would take several high speed connections (like 4 or 8 ethernet ports on the box, you supply the other end) and then via NAT and then intelligently load balance the traffic across those connections. I think it had the ability to transparently redirect traffic based on protocol to these presumably cheap broadband connections.
The idea was that instead of buying another expensive T1 because everyone's reloading Slashdot all the time, you buy cheapie DSL connectivity as needed and run your "unimportant" traffic out this box and the business-critical gets more of the T1.
It's a neat idea.
Sure, you can STORE lots of routes in that much RAM, but how are you going to search that many routes to find the *right* one, in real-time, to route millions (or billions) of packets per second?
"But surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices." This person is definately showing they have no clue what they're talking about. YOu can't just put cheap 100$ 512 SDRAM.... or there goes your Cisco warranty. 1 gig of CIsco RAM will cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most routers that can handle that much RAM are not 'reasonably priced', unless you consider hundreds of thousands reasonable (IE: 7500 with RSP8 card). It's a shame that ISPs and NAPs in New Zealand don't offer BGP advertisements for multihoming. I work for a NAP in North America, and advertising another provider's classes for multihoming purposes is not something unusual; it's common practice.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
I'm not sure why you want to go multihomed, with all the attendant problems that it brings. If this is a corporate connection, that's not got services (other than mail) being provided to the outside world, then I don't really see the point. I think you can provide the redundancy in other ways - here are some ideas, using 2 ISPs (and PA IP addresses allocated by each of them).
Put a mail server on each connection (or map an IP address from each connection through your firewall to the mail server). MX records will do your load balancing and redundancy for you.
Use NAT/PAT for users to connect to the Internet. If one conenction goes down, remove the internal routing to that connection - all your sessions will now go out of the other connection. I find that this is quicker than waiting for BGP to reroute connections via a backup/alternate path. It also gives you more flexibility in internal network numbering, and to move ISPs.
Host services with colocation providers - not internally. Colo service providers have already solved most of the service provision problems, and are well connected to the Internet - I don't think it's worth trying to do this in house.
How many computers do you have on this lan? Why do you think you need to 'own' the IP addresses? First off, you don't even need to own ANY ip addressed to do multihoming. You could NAT all of you LAN boxes up into the single /30 advertisement that your ISP(s) are going to give you for the serial interface on your router, and then have the ISP advertise that out to the 'net, and voila, you have multihoming. When one provider goes down, you can use your IGP to route across the other, OR, if you wanted to go a litte more high-class, you could buy a large router, and take full BGP tables from both providers, and differentiate intelligently based on the preferences sent on the routes. Now, if you don't want to do NAT, and there are a whole slew of good reasons you wouldn't, why are you hung up on ownership of these IP addresses? Why won't you let the IP-allocation process work like it's supposed to? If APNIC had to allocate IPs to every small business in the region it's responsible for, it would take 3 years to get IPs from them. Buy a block of IPs from your ISP(s), and if you transition to another ISP, re-number your network. Or, if you don't wanna go the cheap way, you CAN buy portable IP space from providers. Many of them buy whole Class As just for this purpose, it's just that you're going to have to pay more for these IPs than you would otherwise, as you should, since the ISP's netblocks can become non-contiguous if you leave. As far as your questions about IPv6 and router memory, the internet routing table is well up above 100k routes already, and there are many routers out there that are already having problems dealing with tables of this size. Many Cisco boxes will die in the near future if not upgraded, as their old routing engines run out of memory, and despite the fact that PC memory is cheap, router memory often is not. Especially when you have to install it on the tens of thousands of routers any decently sized ISP will have. IPv6 isn't really even a factor yet.. and when it is, many routers are going to need heavy upgrading (software, hardware, etc) to deal with it, which is why so many ISPs aren't rushing out to do it. So buy some portable IP space, get yourself multihomed, and go buy a good BGP book.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
First of all, RAM on a router is not the issue anymore. The issue is bandwidth. If your router has to maintain 100,000,000 routers instead of 100,000, you have a 1,000 fold increase in routing table updates in network bandwidth.
:-)
Second, IPv6 will solve this, at least for a while. Despite IPv6 having enough addresses for all the particles in the universe, I'm sure we'll run out again in a few years
Finally, how many companies actually need their own IPs? Small ISPs just get their IP range from a larger player, who is providing them with bandwidth. Under normal circumstances, a mom & pop ISP doesn't need an OC-192 - they're probably happy with a T-3. It's cheaper for them to sublet a fraction of a big player's bandwidth then to go at it alone.
The company I work for has IP's assigned from a few of the major US networks (CW, UUNet, etc) and we have BGP4 to allow any of the IP's assigned to us to use any of our backbones. This can cause problems with peering of backbone providers and has caused a few headaches here.
CW recently changed their structure so you can tell them how to advertise your networks to their peers. This resolves most of the problems we have had with multi-homing.
Keep in mind we are a fairly small network with under 100 routing/switching devices on our network. So to say it can not be done means it is time to hire a new network admin.
Not really, and no I'm not.
The Internet already is, always has been, and must be, run by large players. You cannot have an interconnecting network that spans the world and has that many users without someone very big to put the infrastructure (hardware and software) in place, and to maintain it afterwards. The only people capable of doing that are major corporations, and a few very large not-so-commercial bodies (the academic community, for example).
I'm sorry, but if keeping things efficient and practical for these essential big players means you can't play with precious IP address space, then that's the price you're going to have to pay. There just isn't space for everyone to play with their own blocks of IPs any more, and there isn't time for everyone further up the chain to account for them even if the space was there.
Yes, it's unfortunate that some of these big players have a monopoly, which is rarely a good thing. Yes, it's unfortunate that little fish get eaten by big fish. But unless you have a better suggestion, there are only two choices: (a) leave the big fish alone, accept that for now there will be issues, and have an Internet, or (b) get on your high horse about monopoly abuse, civil liberties, and any other subject of pontification you can find, and kill the Internet. Me, I think that's a pretty easy choice.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Seems like a dumb solution to the problem of redundancy. The purpose is to allow communication between two points even if one of two routes fail. The multihoming solution says that you give the endpoints each a single address, and let all the routers figure everything out on the fly. Seems a lot smarter to just have two sets of IP addresses, and negotiate which IP address to use at the connection startup (possibly through round robin DNS). Sure, you might drop a connection and have to bring it back up again, but this can easily be handled by the app layer.
Multihoming will cause BGP route advertisements to go
exponential, and it's an exponential growth that Moore's
law cannot keep up with. This is very worrisome. The
reason is because multihoming breaks heirarchical
addressing assumptions, especially the assumptions that
the last round of CIDR bandaids made. I don't know why
people keep bringing up IPv6. Its design wasn't intended
to deal with route table growth, and while some people
think it may be somewhat helpful since it will start with
CIDR from the get-go, it still expects a heirarchical
provider address space.
This is very old news though, and the source of lots of
flamage on the v6-haters list, including a lot of people
who think the IESG completely fucked up by solving
the wrong problem (address depletion vs. route explosion).