European External Routing after July 1st

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

Dear colleagues,

as most of you will know major changes will happen to the external
routing topology between significant European ISPs.  A major problem
with this is the uncertainty about when exactly changes will happen and
what their precise nature will be.  Fortunately we now have a Routing
Registry and tools to use it.  Registering your routing policy in the
registry immediately makes the information available to all other ISPs
who can use it to diagnose problems.  This can supplement or even
eliminate mail messages about the changes which often do not reach all
those affected.

I strongly suggest that all service providers (YOU!) register any
changes *as they are made*.  Having a real time image on how things
*should* work will certainly help others to keep instabilities at 
a minimum and make external routing work how it should.
Tools like prpath and prtraceroute will show the new intended paths
immediately and compare them to actual paths being used.

Once you have a concrete plan for a major change, register it too as
remarks in the aut-num object.  While this cannot be used by the
diagnostic tools it may be useful to humans who try to understand
what is happening. 

Registering routing policies as they are changed will help to 
minimise instabilities caused by the reconfigurations and
facilitate debugging of problems.

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards

Daniel Karrenberg
RIPE NCC Manager