AS 3130 and 98.128.0.0/16

Regarding strange announcements by AS 3130 of prefixes in 98.128.0.0/16

These prefixes are being used in academic routing research experiments. They are experimental space from ARIN, and we have paid the experimental fees and all that. Otherwise, ARIN is completely unrelated to this work.

The prefixes from this space are actually being announced by AS 3130 in the Westin colo in Seattle USA. But they have very strange AS-paths. We are using AS path poisoning (inserting others' ASNs in the path) [0] to keep those specific ASNs from seeing the test prefixes.

Joe Provo pointed out that when Lorenzo was using this hack, some routers had 'problems' with long AS paths. This experiment is not using long paths. Lorenzo did so to get a lot of ASNs done in one whack. To get high effective throughput, this experiment slices the /16 into /24s and therefore can afford to put very few test ASNs in each path.

No real or production prefixes or data packets are being harmed in this experiment. To quote the most excellent Majdi S. Abbas:

	randy lied but
	no packets died
	enough now

If you become aware that this experiment causes any actual real operational problem, please write to us immediately.

If it is a very serious problem, Randy is old fashioned enough that his phone number is still in whois.

This experiment is being conducted by
Randy Bush <randy@psg.com>
and
Olaf Maennel <olaf@maennel.net>

2009.01.13

[0] - Lorenzo Colitti invented this hack and first published it in early 2005. See his PhD thesis and his futile warning to NANOG, which produced no light but much heat, sigh.
[1] - Due to route flap dampening, we can not change the announcements as frequently as we might like. So it would be prudent to vary a few test parameters, e.g. length of time an announcement is up, to be more confident in our results.