Peering Disputes Migrate To IPv6 111
1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent."
Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
I think we all know about the cake...
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I think we all know about the cake...
It's full of strippers?
Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Funny)
It's full of strippers?
Yahoo!
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it depends on if it's a sheet cake and whether they mean that figuratively or phonetically.
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Re:Uh huh (Score:5, Informative)
It's so delicious and moist! :-)
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Look at me still talking while there's science to do...
analogy (Score:5, Informative)
You're a gay dude. You like to top and you like to bottom. You hook up with another dude, but he doesn't want to bottom, he only wants to top. As much as you love dick in your ass, you want to fuck his ass too.
Hope that helps.
Re:analogy (Score:5, Informative)
As much of a troll as this may have been, it was, sadly, a very accurate analogy of a relationship with Cogent.
Re:analogy (Score:5, Funny)
Can someone give me that as an analogy with bi-curious cars instead?
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Your bisexual male friend (who happens to be a car) wants to play with your girlfriend (who is also a car?). BUT he wont let you play with his (multiple) girlfriends, err.. sorry, cars. They're bored and don't get any while he plays away. In fact, I can think of a few situations like this in real life, too!! Wierd but accurate. Not posted AC..., girls with guts on Slashdot, scary eh?? Guys, run awaaaayyy!
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If you didn't have guts, you would be some sort of person that is all hollow in the inside. That is the stuff of nightmares.
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As more customers complain about not being able to access certain sites. Business will be lost, and gained and eventually it will eventually stabilize.
There we're 3 different links to 3 different ISP's about the previous cases, over IPv4. If that didn't work out like you describe, it's not going to work for IPv6 because no one is still using it.
ob. (Score:3, Funny)
THE CAKE IS A LIE!
Re:ob. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:ob. (Score:5, Funny)
This unfair to Cogent. They are obviously only doing what they must, because they can, for the good of all of us.
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Except the ones who are dead.
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Yes, I think we can all be glad we got that out of our systems.
By the way, did I hear someone say that the IPv6 peering agreement was moist and delicious?
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Oh come on. Just because you're no fun, doesn't mean we aren't.
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Oh, and parent is not offtopic? Or do you have to be an unfunny ass, just like that moderator, to be on topic nowadays?
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Oh, and parent is not offtopic? Or do you have to be an unfunny ass, just like that moderator, to be on topic nowadays?
Yes the g-g-parent was offtopic, and yes being an unfunny ass does help here on /.
but mostly having 37 accounts allows you to mod your own posts up...
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We can avoid any more Portal references for the rest of the discussion.
Yes, now we can get back to the simpsons references, notifications of not being a lawyer, car metaphors, MS bashing, and the inevitable hitler reference.
On the other hand, I believe a highly motivated slashdotter can complete a thread without godwining while enduring the most intense physical pain.
Okay, NOW the portal references are done.
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See example. [slashdot.org]
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"The IT Center reminds you that the Beige IPv6 Router cannot speak. In the event that the Beige IPv6 Router does speak, the IT Center urges you to disregard it's advice."
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Too bad the cake also has a typo... too bad they don't make a spell checker that supports the ICING standard.
The Cake is... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Cake is... (Score:5, Funny)
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Um... that's TFA. It wasn't hard to find. :/
That's ok. I actually clicked on the link the OP posted.
A new low. Re:The Cake is... (Score:1, Funny)
Um... that's TFA. It wasn't hard to find. :/
That's ok. I actually clicked on the link the OP posted.
I believe this is a new low. Thank you.
We've all seen people not read the article.
Occasionally people don't read the summary.
But to have someone not read the article, and then provide a link to it after googling is priceless. I almost blew coke all over my computer. I'm still chuckling.
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Um... that's TFA. It wasn't hard to find. :/
It's in TFA: it has been empirically demonstrated that accessing it is impossible for most people commenting.
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They misspelled "Please" on the cake. Pitiful.
Maybe Cogent is just holding out for a peer that can spell at the 3rd-grade level.
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Hotel catering fail more likely.
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They misspelled "Please" on the cake.
Or... they made a point by peering the über delicious e via IPv6 ;-)
Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone feel like taking bets on how long it will take until the other Tier 1 ISPs gang up on Cogent and just shut off their peering to Cogent?
Seriously, every one of these conflicts that Cogent gets involved in seems to involve Cogent acting like a bunch of dicks and the only people defending them are their most loyal customers and their employees, why are they even still in business?
/Mikael
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Well... if you combine being a bully, and the behavior that psychology calls "reflectance"...
Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:5, Interesting)
Peering is generally only considered "fair" if there is a similar flow of traffic in each direction (averaged over a good period of time). Peering agreements are written with certain traffic ratios defined, and going outside those ratios terminates the agreement or triggers a payment clause. It appears that in every case, Cogent traffic had dropped outside of the contract ratios, and so they were asked to pay for service like anyone else (as it was no longer an equitable peering), and instead they threw a public tantrum and blamed everybody else.
The details are never made public, so when it happens once, you don't really know who is telling the truth. When it happens over and over again with one provider, as with Cogent, a picture begins to form. Cogent is a "tier-1" wanna-be, but don't have the traffic to back it up. They've been caught lying before, so at this point, they have no credibility.
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Why buy expensive new kit when the old stuff still lights up.
A public dispute is better then a 'no' you dont need it, we will upgrade when IPv6 is hyped and cheap.
Re:Oh great, Cogent is at it again (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the old days, whenever our peering ratio started getting wobbly, we'd just set up NNTP servers and have them hammer away (either downloading or uploading, depending on what direction we needed to move the balance).
I assume ISPs are still doing this but they're probably using BitTorrent now instead of NNTP.
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That is true and quite silly all at once. Given network A and B with where B is full of servers that want to serve content (and ads of course) and A is full of clients that want to view that content, both networks have been paid by their customers to complete those transactions and both are failing to honor their agreements if they don't do it.
On one hand, I see what you mean about it always being Cogent involved, but at the same time they undercut prices on all of the networks that have de-peered them, so
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That's true; however, for an ISP there is more to it than that. Depending on which POP generates the traffic, and which one sinks it, hot-potato routing can be unfair
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I guess in your example Comcast shouldn't announce it's routes to the east cost over that peering point then! It's not as if the receiving router is powerless. Alternatively, they could announce the east coast routes with a much higher cost (path). Then if SuperCheapISP abuses that, they can withdraw those announcements and only announce shorter routes they consider more fair and tell SuperCheap where they are willing to peer for east coast routes.
Peering connections don't HAVE to be all or nothing. In theo
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What is the difference between traffic you send me and traffic I request from you? Cogent gets into peering issues because they host a lot of content. Content that users request. I'm a Sprint customer and I pay Sprint to get my to Cogent content. Why should Cogent have to pay Sprint as well?
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Now This Comment... This comment was a Triumph. The previous ones, not so much.
Mod Parent Up.
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I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
I am sorry and normally the last person to call other slashdoters out on a typo but this one was just to funny....
I'm not fan of Cogent, but hell HE, if you care about your customers spend the money and get proper peeing agreements setup instead of blaming the other guy for not wanting to service your customers for free.
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I've been following the Cogentco peering issues for quite some time because we use Cogentco in a few of our locations for internet access or as a VPN backup to our MPLS. I think the other carriers are ganging up and using FUD with Cogent because they can not compete with Cogentco. Other then the occasional peering issues which we can typically get around with some changes because we have multiple carriers in multiple locations, our numbers show our Cogentco service has been at or above average for reliabi
I wouldn't peer with HE either.... (Score:2, Interesting)
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I don't know about this. I've used HE for various hosting needs for over a decade and they were never the 'Wal-mart' in their price and quality range. Using the big box store analogy, I'd rank them a Macy's.
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and their pricing
http://www.internode.on.net/business/web_hosting/business_web_hosting/pricing/ [on.net]
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Internode is only usefull if you happen to be in Australia. .AU and the US)
And if your customers are there too, that helps (given the high cost of links between
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I'd go for the Bravissimo ISP, myself. ;)
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[Hurricane Electric] are the Wal-Mart of bandwidth and offer dirt-cheap prices. [...] how dare they expect to offer the same QoS and not pay for it.
Huh? You meant that there are operators that offer actual QoS for IP traffic? If so, it's an interesting new research result, and I'd like to see the technology.
(More seriously -- unless you can show us that HE's SLA is significantly worse than other operators', I recommend that you shut up. What you're doing is called uninformed FUD.)
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Last I checked, you don't need QoS when there are no congestion issues on your network.
Network traffic tends to be bursty, this means that even with "no congestion issues", there will be queued traffic during the bursts, it just averages out over short periods of time. QoS can be important in these cases since it allows you to move traffic for applications that are adversely affected by latency to the front of the queue. On a network with adequate capacity, the result of this is that things like VoIP work better because the latency stays very low all the time, whilst things like bittorrent
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Ah, so you're slandering them for competitive reasons, then.
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Motivation aside, it's not slander if it's true.
Regarding the motivation, competitors can be a great source of negative information to counter a company's (possibly excessive) self-promotion. Between the two you have all the data you need as a starting point for your own fact-checking.
Would I be an awful person... (Score:4, Funny)
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If I were to express confidence that there is a perfectly cogent explanation for the behavior of both disputing parties?
The net-net is, that's up to your peers.
Now excuse me while IP.
Growing Trend... (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't been with it long enough to know how often this kind of stuff goes on, but are Cake Gestures common in IT/IS/CT? Or only after the release of Portal? I recall IE sending a Cake to Firefox... Or Mozilla... Or something... (or vice versa, I don't really remember who congradulated who)...
It almost seems like they would send a cake hoping it'll get news'd somewhere so the public favours whoever is sending the cake.
Or maybe I'm just paranoid. The companion cube will do that to ya, you know.
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“we stop short of baking cakes” to encourage peering. That got the ball rolling.
Transition going well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go peer with google instead (Score:2, Interesting)
They've already bought loads of dark fibre, maybe they'd be interested in getting a controlling stake in IPv6 early on.
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Right, so you peer with Google, who have a fairly open peering policy. How does that solve you getting access to Cogent's customers? You expect Google to leak Cogent's routes to it's peers free of charge?
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The problem probably wouldn't be getting Google to route your traffic to Cogent through their net, the problem would be Cogent blackholing all traffic from your AS regardless of how it was routed to them (as they've done before).
/Mikael
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Also I don't think Google would do transit for anyone, it's not in their interrest (normally).
Could someone elaborate? (Score:2, Interesting)
For those of us who don't have experience with how the big ISPs connect to each other, could someone shed some light on the situation? Does peering involve a physical connection or is it just down to advertising routes? I thought having your routes advertised was a good thing.
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Some info here [wikipedia.org]
Basically, different companies own and operate the physical cables, and they charge for use. To provide their own clients with access to other parts of the internet in principle they would have to buy bandwidth from their competitors, but rather than do this, the network owners often make agreements to pass on data for each other free of charge.
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http://www.renesys.com/blog/2005/12/peering_the_fundamental_archit.shtml
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That cleared it up for me. Thanks.
Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score:5, Informative)
The following is copied from a previous Cogent/Spint debacle posting:
Just like what happened with Level(3) a few years ago.
Cogent's history in the ISP market has been absolutely horrible. They came in to town as the Walmart of ISPs, investing in a huge new super-efficient backbone infrastructure doing everything it could to cut costs so they could offer insane deals to their customers. They were running 10Gigabit connections using existing fiber and brand new equipment. They had no 'legacy' hardware.
The hosting industry bit into the Cogent game when they had customers running multimedia sites that needed tons of bandwidth (see: porn) and were tired of paying insane rates per mbps when Cogent had this brand new network with tons of capacity.
But Cogent wasn't in the 'settlement free interconnect' game yet, they were paying for bandwidth themselves. So they went out and purchased a few ISPs that already had settlement free interconnects. The agreements are already in place, so it was a big win situation for them. But these agreements almost always come with the term that you must give as much as you receive (so you need to have a balance between hosted sites and end users.) Cogent didn't have end users, they had servers.
Think of it this way: I am an apartment complex and I have an agreement to mow my neighbor's lawn and in exchange he shovels my sidewalk. It uses approximately the same amount of work. Now imagine my neighbor and all of his agreements are bought by the local golf course. Now the golf course now expects me to mow the entire course because the agreement was that they would shovel and I would mow. Cogent was the golf course, I am an ISP.
Now in my apartment I house a bunch of golfers once I say "screw this, figure out your lawn situation yourself" the course says "ok, well, I guess your tenants are going to have to go without golf." What the hell am I to do now? Mow this golf course to keep my tenants happy?
Finally I come to an agreement, the golf course has to pay me a small amount and I will mow their grass. Everything seems OK, but then the golf course gets in to a bit of trouble and all of a sudden decides "OK, well... he doesn't want his tenants to go without golf so he will probably keep mowing our grass even if we stop paying him." Here we are again, I'm in an impossible situation because I really care about my tenants but man, I just cannot mow an entire golf course all by myself. So I send the golf course warnings after warnings, and after I reach a tipping point I just say "GFY, I'm not mowing your course anymore." I stop mowing it, and the golf course says "IT IS TOTALLY HIS FAULT THAT YOU CANNOT PLAY GOLF!!!"
Right now a lot of ISPs can hit Cogent's old pricing (and Cogent just cannot go any lower than they already are) so a lot if ISPs will just pass on Cogent and go for someone with a better record.
There is a lot more to the story that we don't know about, and since these agreements are generally done under a NDA we will never know for sure what exactly is happening at Cogent.
Just a FYI: I work for a hosting company that has had some dealings with Cogent in the past.
Re:Seen before with Cogent/Sprint (Score:4, Insightful)
The analogy doesn't work though, because no matter how much traffic there is or how unbalanced it may be, every last bit of it represents a peer on one network that has paid for connectivity with the other network. Every meg Cogent shoveled through the peering point only went there because a customer of the other network wanted his porn from a server on Cogent's network.
I won't say that Cogent is in any way, shape or form perfect. They could stand to improve a LOT in many areas. But then, the same is true of every transit provider.
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The problem is hot-potato routing, and the fact that cogent (anyone, really) will push that traffic out of their network and into someone else's over the peering point as soon as possible.
If they held the packet for as much as they possible could in their network, the tale would be different. But that's not easy to do, and generally not done anyway except in very, VERY specific situations.
So, the peering agreements among such networks really have to try to strike a balance of in/out traffic, and either term
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They could apply that infinite amount of expertise they all tell their customers they have and announce correct route costs and only announce reasonable routes through the peering points.
Hot potato routing depends on the 'victim' using dumb-as-a-brick routing plans.
Of course the lack of appropriate route plans and peering costs everyone. I have seen some routes for my own traffic that make no sense whatsoever for either party.
Case in point, going from my home to a particular geographically close server. the
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If there's a 3rd network involved, it is transit, not peering. It's perfectly understandable that a network wants to be paid for transit (where the traffic neither originates nor terminates in their network).
Yummm, Cake! (Score:1)
The cake is not a lie! (Score:2)
The cake was presented during a Peering BoF at the NANOG meeting in Dearborn, MI this week, in reference to a joke on the NANOG mailing list that they had tried everything with Cogent short of baking them a cake.
I was there, and the cake was tasty. :)
What happened to IPv5? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm just sayin.
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If we are gonna skip numbers, why "6"?, sounds like the devil's work to me. They even use "hex" numbers in the dot notation... (which is 8 groups of 4 hex digits... so why not IPv8?)
8 looks too much like 6. We'll have to bring back IPv9 [ietf.org] instead.
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Anyways, I'll wait for v6.0.1 to have most of the bugs ironed out.
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Someone already tried IPv7 [ietf.org] in 1993.
IPv6 makes spamming easier, HE spams (Score:1)
Considering the amount of spam historically coming from HE's network, I can't really blame Cogent for not wanting to peer HE's IPv6 traffic. Fighting spam in IPv6 space in much much more difficult than the current state of affairs.
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BS? Really. Join spam-l and ask what the membership thinks of SMTP mail over IPv6, and why they feel that way. You'll get educated quickly.
Also, I'm not defending Cogent. They have a track record for signing up snowshoers as well, though not nearly as bad as HE. WRT 'tier' status, one must have a nation wide backbone to be considered tier 1. HE has never had a backbone, but always peered to get backbone access. HE is merely a regional player in the west.
Mandatory xkcd (Score:1)