Re: IXP hardware

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

On Thu, Mar 07, 2002 at 11:12:36PM +0100, Americo F. Muchanga wrote:
>    UEM has a small grant from DFID to help
>    establish the IX, so i thought it'd be easier to have one bigger
>    Router rather than having many small routers terminating lines from
>    ISPs. So my question now is what do you think about having one large
>    router terminating the lines from isps as suggested by antonio.

In DFID language, the main argument against this is "sustainability".

If a WAN interface card connecting ISP A breaks, will ISP B and C be happy
to share the cost of replacing it? Who is going to manage it, especially if
the one person who understands its configuration leaves? Is that person
going to be on-call 24x7 to respond to operational needs for routing
configuration changes? If so, who is going to pay their salary?

With L2 the problems become much simpler - the IXP is responsible just for
power/cooling and a vanilla switch. Those are important responsibilities of
course, but why add more difficult ones?

B.

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