Allot of documenation i have read suggest PA blocks are less likley to be filtered out of BGP announcements that PI blocks.
Out of curiousity how does a filter differenciate between a PA and PI block, i would have thought an address block can only be differentiated by its prefix length alone ?
So do isp's actually compile a list PA an PI space using whois and put this information into thier BGP route filters ? Seems it would be a very tedious way of filtering PI announcements.
No, that would be tedious and unmanageable. ISP usually filter on prefix size and filter out long prefixes (say /24 and up) as ISP's usually advertise /16, /17 etc.. That's one way of doing it anyway.
PI space would tend to have a longer prefix and so would be more likely to be filtered by tier 1 (or maybe even tier 2) ISP's.
To be more precise they actually might use something like ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/docs/ripe-380.txt which is also available for the other registries (ARIN, AfriNIC, LACNIC and APNIC)
The general guideline between tier 1s is to filter at the /24 and shorter level. (/23, /22, etc..)
Longer prefixes between peers will usually be dependent larger aggregate blocks to pass between peers. Since PI space is doled out at /24 and larger, it usually doesn't encounter filtering based on mask length. I believe there are a couple filtering at /21 level still. (not 100% on that)
Glen, the nsp's don't really care if it is PA or PI space and don't compile lists like that.
So if i had my own addresses that couldn't be agregated, say of prefix length /23 i could well be stuffed due to the filtering that could occur between tier 1's
I say this as we qualify for our own /23 small pa space with RIPE. If we chose to go down that route and announce our routes with bgp via 2 upstream isp's through multihoming we could get filtered.
It sounds like we may be better getting address space allocated out of one isp's aggregatable block and announce this over both isp's so that way at least we could rely on the shorter prefix aggregates getting announced everywhere.
With a /23 you should be fine since /23 > /24. With your PI /23 and 2 upstreams, you should have no problems announcing your route globally. I personally think it is better to get PI space than PA if you qualify for it. If you change upstreams later on and have PA space, think of the nasty renumbering job you have in front of you.
When it comes to address space, think in terms of 32 bit addresses, so it helps to be able to think in binary (well, kinda).
larger (more total ip addresses) netblocks have shorter netmasks. smaller netblocks have longer netmasks.
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