Level 3 Cogent Cutoff Problems Continue

NYC RR is back up, my friend tells me he can access drudgereport.com

About friggin' time...

NB

That's tellin' the bastereds.

Read the EL Forum.

»Earthlink DSL

I'm on Earthlink dial up. The proxies and other fixes in the Earthlink forum won't work for me.

I get that. What I don't get is that
1) if Cogent is no longer a peer of L3
2) if Cogent is still a peer with (let's say) UUNET (or another Tier1)

Shouldn't Cogent now be considered by L3 as a customer of UUNET and therefore be accepted inbound on the UUNET L3 peering? Or is it something that's not automatic, and Cogent didn't do that?

You are doing something different as others have posted it works only on dial up and it doesn't work on DSL. Ask them what they did as it sounds like you may have missed something.

It's not the case that L3 is dropping the packets. Think about it. If Cogent was truely a Tier 1 ISP, they would have multiple peering connection as does L3. L3 has over 300 Gigs of peering connections. If they close down thier Cogent connection, and an L3 router gets a request for a cogent route, they send it to one of thier other peers, and it would in-turn deliver to cogent. That only works if 1 - Cogent has peering agreements with others and 2 Cogent doesn't black-hole a packet with an L3 header. Since cogent has other perring agreements, then Cogent must be dropping every single packet it sees from L3. It is the ONLY explaination...Right? I asked some friends with cogent service to trace route a ping they made to L3 web site. It died. I asked them to ping MCI web site, low and behold it went right through. My company uses L3, so i asked the guys to do the sames test, the trace route said that the request to Cogent's web site was routed via a UUnet router, then it died.

It as simple as that...Cogent, with 60 days notice from L3 that they were going to de-peer them, did nothing to prepare the event, instead made a political power play and is blaming L3.

WHAT?? L3 should pay millions of dollars a year to maintain peering conenctions that provide them no value?? peering only works if something is mutually benefitial. Routers, cards and data center space, power and cooling isn't free.

Simple test - an equitable agreement would be what?? your inlaws could stay with you for two weeks a year, in exchange, you get to use thier beach front Hawaii house for two weeks a year. Instead, they stay with you for 40 weeks a year, and you get thier house for 12 hours per year? is that equitable? You get to pay for the increased food, water, gas and electric bill.

No, Cogent is not a customer of UUNet. That's the whole point of peering. While Cogent does pay at least one Tier 1 for transit, they only pay that Tier 1 for their routes and their customer's routes. That's the whole point of peering - you trade only certain routes - not a full routing table. A true Tier 1 in the traditional sense of the term, does not pay *anyone* for bandwidth or peering. They only invest in themselves for the upkeep, equipment, and maintenance of the peering session(s).

For example, If MCI/UUNEt one day decides that Sprint is no longer providing a mutually beneficial peering arrangement (Sprint sending more traffic to UUNet than UUNet is sending back), and UUNet de-peers Sprint, then UUNet and Sprint networks will not reach each other. It has nothing to do with access lists or access filters. It's how the internet and the underlying BGP protocol work. Sprint would then be left to either re-negotiate their ASSES off with UUNet, or be forced to purchase transit from UUNet or another Tier 1.

This has happened before with large providers and will continue to happen every once in a while. It's unfortunate that the smaller fish is almost always the one who will pay dearly in the end, but that's how life (and the internet) is. It's full of uncertainty and unfairness.

Do some research before you post. Cogent peers with more networks than some of the largest Tier 1 providers.Wrong again. There are *multiple* L3/Cogent peering points. You obviously don't understand how the internet works. If L3 shuts down their Cogent peering sessionS, then they cannot reach Cogent and vice versa because there is NO ROUTE to the Cogent network. Peers do not announce other peers' networks to each other. That would be called TRANSIT, not PEERING. Read up on BGP and the concept of AS-paths before you spread misinformation like you know what you're talking about.Wow, you're a regular Inspector Gadget, aren't you? If this were true, you would know that MCI blocks ICMP echo-requests and echo-responses to their website.Where's the traceroute? How come you didn't do it yourself?I do agree with you on this point.

False. The way it works is that Level3 routers receive the Cogent routes either from Cogent over peering links or from other providers that cogent uses as transit. If Level3 doesn't receive the routes one way or the other then they don't have a path to Cogent. The peering links were turned off with multiple weeks' notice and Cogent did not make the arrangements for Level3 to get the routes through one of their transit providers. Cogent could have sent the routes as well as received the level3 routes through someone like Verio.
_VF

Single homed customers only. Multi-homed customers will have routes via other providers. People are saying that Level3 was missing about 1000 routes and Cogent about 4000 out of the overall 150k on the Internet today.

_VF

I smell a lot of BS, I just received a fax from CI Hosting explaining in a panic that my websites are no longer accessible because of the Level3 Cogent spat - so I should use them for hosting. I have 2 national ISPs, neither of which is Cogent or Level3...

If CI Hosting stoops to sending out fraudulent junk faxes trying to drum up business, they must be desperate losers...