[afnog] Peering for Route Analysis

[Todd Underwood]

randy, all,

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 11:59:58PM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
> > We will be willing to swap one license of our Routing Intelligence
> > web tool with interested parties in Africa who agree to this peering.
> 
> you might explain what this tool would do to benefit folk.

certainly! (obviously, randy already knows all of this, but it's a
great question for the community in general).

as people in this community may be aware, there are some important
reasons to look at routing from the outside of your network in, rather
than the routes on your router alone.  internet routing is done in a
distributed fashion, so by looking at your routes as they are received
on other networks around the net, certain kinds of troubleshooting
become possible.

for example, you can determine whether your upstreams or their
upstreams (or peers) are accepting all of your announcements.  you can
determine whether your prefixes are consistently reachable from the
whole internet, or subject to periodic partial unreachability (which
is extremely difficult to troubleshoot without external visibility).
other examples include troubleshooting route-hijacking (or the
hijacking of more specifics), policing of AS-adjacencies, etc.
visibility into the external routing into your network doesn't solve
every problem, but it solves a class of problems that are difficult to
solve in any other way.

as people may be aware, there are some good sources for this
information already.  in particular the route-views project:

http://routeviews.org/

and the RIPE RIS project:

http://www.ripe.net/ris/

both are freely available and meet the needs i described above.

so what does renesys add, then?  primarily, we think we have a better
interface to these data (more graphical tools and searching), our
servers are faster when searching through a lot of routing updates,
and it is therefore easier for network engineers to find the problems
that they're looking for.  that said, we encourage everyone to support
and use the routeviews and ris projects as well.

i hope that is sufficient explanation of the value we think that there
is in external routing information services and that some more of you
are convinced to establish peerings with renesys.  

thanks,

t.

-- 
_____________________________________________________________________
todd underwood                                 +1 603 643 9300 x101
renesys corporation                            chief of operations & security 
todd at renesys.com                               http://www.renesys.com/blog/todd.shtml