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"BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

aaka.sh

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Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by 'full BGP tables' you mean the entire internet routing table, you don't need that to advertise a network on the internet. You can receive just a default route if you wish and still be able to advertise to any carriers you have a connection with. You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that.

> You can receive just a default route … You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that. Except you do lose out on best path routing / any other outbound TE, and you’re now restricted to rudimentary load balancing methodologies / manual prefix-specific hackery.

Only for outbound traffic, tho.

For eyeball networks and other stub networks this is mostly fine.

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by 'full BGP tables' you mean the entire internet routing table, you don't need that to advertise a network on the internet. You can receive just a default route if you wish and still be able to advertise to any carriers you have a connection with. You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that.

> You can receive just a default route … You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that. Except you do lose out on best path routing / any other outbound TE, and you’re now restricted to rudimentary load balancing methodologies / manual prefix-specific hackery.

If you aren't multi-homed that doesn't matter at all though.

For a home network I'm guessing you are pretty unlikely to do the multi-homing from the house, more likely you will either just have a single upstream or if you are connecting it into your own collocated infrastructure you will do iBGP and let your actual edge BGP routers handle the multi-homed upstreams and sync the full route table etc.

I was tempted to do this once before when I was running my own hosting company but it was prohibitive cost wise to get the circuit I wanted. :(

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#54

I'm curious to know details like what sort of house or dwelling this person lives in; anyplace with enough capacity for all that (4U rack space, power and cooling, etc.) seems spacious. The article says it's right off a major street. So is it urban? Suburban? Single-family home? Inquiring minds want to know.

I have a couple of 2U racks vertically mounted behind a door. Takes up zero usable space!

It took me way too long to realize this option - many builds using miniture casings with cooling issues later, when buying large 2U cases with 120mm fan walls is the ticket.

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#55
post #42

Huh, so per the last paragraph, they're paying a ton to have an SLA, all the ISP has to provide is basic connectivity because BGP and stuff is being done by the customer themselves, and yet they have more outages in a few months than I have on a consumer connection in years? The whole thing has a lot of hack value, it's cool and also worth something to be in control of your own networking, even if it's more expensive…

You're absolutely feeling the same problems on consumer connections. With DIA, you're the only subscriber on that circuit, so if upstream is having a problem then your neighboring consumers will have them too.

Lower bandwidth dedicated circuits can often "feel" faster than a higher bandwidth consumer connection.

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#56

I rent a single ~600 meter fiber that connects my home to the network infrastructure of the company I run. The rent is $75/mo or so. I have passive CWDM muxes on the line to run two 10G connections to two separate edge routers. My home router is a MikroTik CRS309—it’s about $250, fanless, has 8 SFP+ ports and advertises my home network blocks over BGP to the two routers (for HA). The setup works great. The best part…

> My home router is a MikroTik CRS309 ... advertises my home network blocks over BGP How do you fit two full BGP tables into 512MB of RAM? I've looked into MikroTik boxes before and maybe they're doing something I'm not understanding. On the routers I have manage, two IPv4 feeds take up about 1.1GB and three IPv6 adds another 450MB.

Use BIRD:

    bird> show memory 
    BIRD memory usage
    Routing tables:    262 MB
    Route attributes:  120 MB
    ROA tables:        192  B
    Protocols:         171 kB
    Total:             382 MB


    bird> show route count table r1
    906312 of 906312 routes for 906312 networks
    bird> show route count table r2
    903532 of 903532 routes for 903532 networks
    bird> 
routes in kernel will take less as you're only getting best one exported to kernel and no route attributes to hold

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by 'full BGP tables' you mean the entire internet routing table, you don't need that to advertise a network on the internet. You can receive just a default route if you wish and still be able to advertise to any carriers you have a connection with. You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that.

> You can receive just a default route … You won't lose out on any functionality in dual homing or anything like that. Except you do lose out on best path routing / any other outbound TE, and you’re now restricted to rudimentary load balancing methodologies / manual prefix-specific hackery.

And that's why SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) technology now exists. In a lot of ways it is even better than BGP in that you direct traffic based on performance measurements - either actively through SLA tests or passively watching traffic flows and measuring latency. Using BGP routing based on hop counts and AS paths is akin to following road signs rather than getting live routing that knows traffic for instance from Google Maps

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#58

I'm curious to know details like what sort of house or dwelling this person lives in; anyplace with enough capacity for all that (4U rack space, power and cooling, etc.) seems spacious. The article says it's right off a major street. So is it urban? Suburban? Single-family home? Inquiring minds want to know.

You need like, a closet

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#59
> While the SLA says 100%, don't expect perfection

I've always considered Verizon's (and prior to that, WorldCom and/or MCI) 100% SLA to be pure marketing BS.

Anyone who's ever worked with telecoms knows it's simply unrealistic. Fibres will get cut, carrier's routers will need software updates etc. etc. etc.

I reckon the reason you pay a Verizon-tax is so they have spare cash floating around to pay you the inevitable SLA penalties.

Personally, I prefer dealing with carriers who have more real-world SLAs.

Re: "BGP at home": getting a DIA circuit installed at home

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Residential internet service is oversubscribed and doesn't have an SLA.

don't worry, there's no way the techs at Comcast could figure out how to prioritize speedtest.net in their QoS tables.

Nah the trick is to host speedtest.net node in your network
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