[H-GEN] What can we do ?

[Andrew Pullin]

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Hi Joe (& all),
    This routing may not necessarily be manually set up, in fact it is most
likely NOT manually set up. As you may know, TCP/IP networks are set up to
route packets over alternate routes if the direct route is not available
when possible. With automatic routing algorythms, most routers are checking
to see if a link is "up" or "down" and also to check the "cost" of sending a
packet to that link depending on the routing algorythm used. This may not be
the case here, but if the critical router in this chain is "down", then the
router that makes the decision on where to forward your packet may only have
international choices available, since it usually cannot send a packet back
to the router it recieved it from unless there is an error. If this is the
case, then the other routing hops are just fallout from this problem. I
would suggest that this is a temporary problem that would be fixed in a few
days at most when someone notices the critical router is down, or network
traffic becomes sluggish and people complain. I agree it isn't acceptable,
but there is probably not much you can do about it. If it is still happening
this time next week, then I would be making a phone call to your ISP.
    Cheers!
        Andrew.


----- Original Message -----
From: Joe Skilton
To: general at lists.humbug.org.au
Sent: Monday, July 28, 2003 6:30 PM
Subject: [H-GEN] What can we do ?


Hi Everyone,
                    Ok, I'm going to hold off on the <rant> for at least
this message, because someone may be able to prove me wrong here, but I
cannot see the sense in this(sorry if it's a little off topic):

I refer to a recent tracert of which iv removed the first few hops so I
don't implicate a certain ISP here:

  8    30 ms    30 ms    20 ms  Pos4-0.chw-core2.Sydney.telstra.net
[203.50.6.22
5]
  9    40 ms    30 ms    40 ms
10GigabitEthernet3-0.pad-core5.Sydney.telstra.ne
t [203.50.6.90]
 10    30 ms    20 ms    81 ms
GigabitEthernet0-0.syd-core02.Sydney.net.reach.c
om [203.50.13.250]
 11    30 ms    30 ms    30 ms  i-1-0.syd-core01.net.reach.com
[202.84.143.133]

 12   210 ms   220 ms   211 ms  i-13-0.sjc-core01.net.reach.com
[202.84.143.17]

 13   280 ms   280 ms   281 ms  i-11-0.chi-core01.net.reach.com
[202.84.143.58]

 14   310 ms   311 ms   320 ms  i-12-0.eig-core01.net.reach.com
[202.84.143.86]

 15   311 ms   320 ms   311 ms  i-10-0.nwk-core01.net.reach.com
[202.84.143.90]

 16   311 ms   310 ms   320 ms  i-3-1.nwk02.net.reach.com [202.40.148.122]
 17   321 ms   310 ms   311 ms  nyiix.he.net [198.32.160.61]
 18   400 ms   381 ms   390 ms  gige-g0-0-19s.gsr12008.fmt.he.net
[216.218.254.1
53]
 19   301 ms   290 ms   301 ms  216.218.226.110
 20   331 ms   330 ms   341 ms  ge2-0.1000.cor01-maew-sjc.comindico.net
[203.194
.0.57]
 21   330 ms   321 ms   310 ms  pos2-2.155.cor01-alex-scn.comindico.net.au
[203.
194.0.74]
 22   311 ms   320 ms   331 ms  pos4-0.155.cor01-kent-syd.comindico.net.au
[203.
194.0.105]
 23   401 ms   691 ms   340 ms  pos6-0.wsr01-eagl-bne.comindico.com.au
[203.194.
59.222]

Look closely at hops 9 to 23, keeping in mind that this is a trace to an
AUSTRALIAN(infact, no more than 30km from where the trace was done) website
hosted on comindico's network, can anyone explain to me why this traffic
goes over an International Link(To HONG KONG among other destinations) and
then returns over a different international link to it's country of origin?,
now i'm not going to pretend i'm a routing guru, but this seems stupid to
me, can anyone shed some light on why someone in their right mind would ever
setup a network to do that and not just get some kind of peering arangement
with comindico for me?

Meanwhile i'll just accept yet another Corporate Cockshafting, and accept my
200+ ms ping jump when my nationally directed traffic hits an international
link.

Cheers,
        Joe


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