[BBLISA] BGP and Anycast for regular folks [was Telecommunications Recommendations...]

[Dean Anderson]

Interesting topic, nonetheless.

On Fri, 16 Jul 2010, Robert Keyes wrote:

> It's preety much become neccessary in these days where there's lots of
> routes and not enough IP space. In the case I mention, the primary ISP
> doesn't have to announce a specific route; it's aggregated in with the
> rest of their IP space. Only the secondary ISP does, so one route
> announcement is saved.

There is still one more entry in the global route table shared by all
other ISPs.  BGP isn't really an option for, well, nearly everyone.  In
that respect, BGP doesn't scale well at all.

> > through. I think some of the DNS root servers are using "anycast"
> > and small BGP announcements for redundancy purposes.
> 
> Anycast! Yes I hadn't thought of that..it makes sense. Well, that's
> the first new thing I've learned today.

<grin>For some reason, last year ISC (the principal anycast DNS
promoter)  has lost most of its ordinary funding. I've been trying to
figure out exactly what the makeup of that funding was, but whatever it
was, its gone now. Rick Adams had to make up $1.6 million out of about
$2 million. Vixie himself still takes $252,000 of the $2 million,
according to their IRS form 990.  [non-profits aren't supposed to inure
benefits to their founders beyond fair salary. Pretty much, no small
non-profits don't pay their CEOs roughly 12% of revenue--a company isn't
really non-profit at that rate--that's in the realm of a for-profit
S-Corp. Even large non-profits don't usually pay $252,000/yr to CEOs;
that's a scandalously large amount. That amount is an unconscionably
high both in dollars and in percentage of non-profit revenue; similar
numbers have been focus of TV news expose's).

Anyway, pretty much everyone knows by now that Anycast isn't stable with
TCP. Anycast only works for stateless protocols and TCP isn't stateless.  
And TCP is now on the top of the DNS list thanks to ... [drum roll]:  
DNSSEC!! [DNSSEC is another Vixie-IETF-disaster for reasons Dan
Bernstein, myself, and others detailed some years ago; The Vixie/Cerf
mafia tried to silence us, but they failed at that, too]. That's not to
say they weren't successful in business, though. I just feel sorry for
the people who wasted their money on buying Anycast DNS services from
ISC, Affilias/Neustar etc. And I will someday feel sorry for the
Internet when some of the other DNS "Vixie-flaws" are eventually
exploited. But, aside from those things...I'm having a very happy year
:-)  </grin>

Enjoy life everyone,


		--Dean

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