[ih] The story of BGP?

[Louis Mamakos]

On Feb 8, 2013, at 3:54 PM, Scott Brim <scott.brim at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 3:30 PM, Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com> wrote:
>> I think some is documented in the Mills/HWB paper at SIGCOMM '87.
> 
> January 2, 1987 is when we hooked up Cornell and Columbia and created
> a routing loop with ARPAnet that blackholed all of HP's traffic.  Dave
> Mills said "we need route filters" and etc.

There's all sorts of subtle behavior in there, too.  Early NSFNET days had
regional networks and university networks with "backdoor" connectivity sharing
trying to share RIP to "make it work" somehow.  RIP can only count so high, and
16 == infinity.  If you think about the network diameter, at 16 hops you have 
the zone of death, where a route announcement is "poisoned" and unreachable
even via a default route the long way around.

This all seems so very obvious now, but we were gluing stuff together with
spit, bailing wire and gated.  I recall there are some very carefully 
crafted tables of metric transformations inside of gated when injecting
routes learned from, e.g., HELLO into RIP and vice versa. 

Louis Mamakos