[Atlas-anchors-pilot] Pilot Phase Two, and other news

Aleksi Suhonen Aleksi.Suhonen at trex.fi
Wed May 22 02:33:39 CEST 2013 

Hi,

On 05/21/2013 08:20 PM, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> On 20/05/2013 04:05, Aleksi Suhonen wrote:
>> How about starting off with AS112 instances on the Anchors? Putting
>> K-root instances on the Anchors may feel daunting, because you can't
>> anticipate if the Atlas Anchor functionality and the K-root
>> functionality might adversely affect each other.

> this can't happen until the anchors support an internal layer 3 network,
> with a bgp capable transit router VM providing connectivity.

Err ... All our own anycast services at TREX are separate VMs which are 
L2-connected to separate VLANs. VMs run quagga/bird/something to talk 
with routers in its VLAN if needed. We just recently switched to 
OpenVSwitch which has so far been much better than the hacks we had 
before, which were OK to begin with. :-)

The host OS is the only one that can send untagged packets to the real 
switches. And the host OS's network is not routed at all.

We are fully prepared to support dot1q tags on the RIPE Atlas Anchor 
ports, including the peering VLAN for use by AS112 and AS25152 instances.

 > If this is
> built, I'd love to see anchor boxes sitting on an IXP so that we could
> measure IXP performance rather than the performance of my IXP management
> routers (and yes, I do understand the limits of what I'm asking for here).

Yes, that is a separate benefit from your suggestion, but it is not a 
requirement. We have the same disadvantage wrt IXP mgmt rtrs.

This debate is a matter of host/hypervisor network architecture. If the 
anchors did their own L3, they might soon need their own PI addresses 
and ASNs too. I find that the L2 virtualization architecture implements 
the KISS principle much better.

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