Re: IXP hardware

[Brian Candler <B.Candler at pobox.com>]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 10:56:14PM +0200, antonio at nambu.uem.mz wrote:
> Thanks guys.
> That's just what I needed to know. I guess it would be each ISP's 
> responsability to bring their router to the IXP. I was also thinking of a 
> contribution from all ISP's involved to buy a single router with multiple 
> Serial and ethernet interfaces where they would all connect, something 
> like a cisco 7200 series. How does that sound?

That would be the "layer3" solution which Geert Jan advised against.

The problem is that if you have a central router, it can't belong to any one
ISP's Autonomous System, so it would have to be in its own AS. That means
that traffic from one ISP to another ISP would transit a third AS, and all
ISPs would have to share the same routing policy.

Experience shows that this doesn't work. Peering is about politics and
finance (layers 8 and 9 of the ISO model :-), and having a central router
breaks those layers.

Keep your IXP at layer 2. The shared part of the infrastructure is then very
cheap and easy to manage (e.g. just a hub), and everything else is therefore
the property of, and responsibility of, the individual members. If they
break their own routing tables, it is nobody's fault but their own.

Cheers,

Brian.

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