karn@faline.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) (11/05/87)
Our gateway between bellcore-net and the ARPANET is ipswitch.bellcore.com, a Sun 3/160 running Sun Unix 3.4 and Sun Link DDN 5.0. We're running Kirton's EGP as distributed by Sun. Lately I've noticed some rather persistent routing connectivity problems in the Internet. Many destinations fail to respond to packets sent from hosts on bellcore-net (128.96) but are shown to be up when I initiate connections from ipswitch. A given host can be unresponsive for days. I know that ipswitch is sending the proper connectivity information to the core because I can see bellcore-net in another ARPANET machine's routing table. I suspect the problem is related to the inability of many gateways to handle ever-larger EGP updates. I noticed problems on ipswitch in that entries for outside sites would appear in the routing table shortly after booting, but after several minutes they would disappear leaving only the entry for network 10. Some sleuthing revealed that every incoming EGP update had a checksum error. I increased the size of MAXPACKETSIZE in defs.h from 1006 to 2048 and recompiled. The problem has not recurred. I suspect that there are many other gateways out there with the same problem; what can we do to get them fixed? Phil
ernie@nucsrl.UUCP (Ernest Woodward) (11/11/87)
> / nucsrl:comp.protocols.tcp-ip / karn@faline.bellcore.com (Phil R. Karn) > / 10:27 pm Nov 4, 1987 / > > Lately I've noticed some rather persistent routing connectivity problems > in the Internet. Many destinations fail to respond to packets sent from > hosts on bellcore-net (128.96) but are shown to be up when I initiate > connections from ipswitch. A given host can be unresponsive for days. > ... > I suspect the problem is related to the inability of many gateways to > handle ever-larger EGP updates. ... > > I increased the size of > MAXPACKETSIZE in defs.h from 1006 to 2048 and recompiled. The problem > has not recurred. I suspect that there are many other gateways out there > with the same problem; what can we do to get them fixed? > > Phil ---------- I have had routing problems for the last two weeks and failed to understand why my egp neighbors could not assist me in routing. I believe that the above information on my EGP implementation may be the problem. I am also trying to implement gated, and it may be important to check that it also uses an appropriate MAXPACKETSIZE. I am still testing routing daemons to determine if the MAXPACKETSIZE was the root of all my problems over the last two weeks. The moral of the story is that I would like to see information like that presented by Phil distributed in the same fashion as the updates on the SRI host tables. All ARPANET host administrators might need this information and I am not sure that all of the administrators have access to USENET or have registration on the comp.protocols.tcp-ip mailing lists. Or, those on the mailing lists/USENET might not get as lucky as I and notice this important information amongst several other articles. Ernie Woodward Northwestern University Academic Computing and Network Services
brescia@PARK-STREET.BBN.COM (Mike Brescia) (11/15/87)
Phil,
I recommend that you get on the EGP-PEOPLE mailing list. Send request to
'egp-people-request@bbn.com'. Your problem first had a fix announced there a
year ago February (that's 1986).
I would have restricted this note to a private answer, but I want to suggest
that anyone else reading TCP-IP and operating an EGP gateway get on the
EGP-PEOPLE list also.
Mike