BGP filter failure brings Aussie Internet down | Hacker News Reader

BGP filter failure brings Aussie Internet down

lists.ausnog.net

85 pointschewxy17 comments

Since BGP related topics are super rare here... If any of you are programmers interested in writing code that impacts the global routing table, we're hiring at OpenDNS.

We are AS36692 and anycast thousands of IPs, route a few dozen prefixes and have about 200+ neighbors across 14 datacenters. You would be hard pressed to find a network this large run by such a small team.

Uhh... Did Monster cancel your guys' account for overuse or something?

For the non network admins amongst us: http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2012-February/01222...

that was fascinating. i thought i understood the internet but i followed through with discovering what the terminology meant and feel a few times more clever right now. also, overwhelmed with putting the pieces together in my mind about where decentralisation breaks down.

The lack of security and authenticity in BGP is really one of the great weak points of the Internet. Problems are resolved quickly, but problems and mistakes are easy to make which is the first order problem.

There is work being done to better secure the BGP and prefix delegation / announcement infrastructure now: http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog49/abstracts.php?pt=MTU3N...

I think this is the related thread on whirlpool (aussie broadband forums/news) http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1871831

Dodo! Dodo, internet that dies. Local internet was being routed via the US. I was visiting Australia as it happened. My connection had to route to the USA get to the ISP's own DNS servers!

It's not the entire Australian internet that is down, just one of the major providers; it will also affect a lot of secondary providers that use Telstra for their upstream links.

Telstra's outage visualized: http://www.bgpmon.net/telstra-feb23-2012.png

National Australia Bank was completely down for 53 minutes as well. https://twitter.com/#!/bgpmon/status/172608854855647233/phot...

Here is a list of everyone who was affected http://bgp.he.net/AS1221#_peers

Meh..

Everyone in Australia peers with Telstra. "Affected" in this case in meaningless.

go figure, Dodo was involved.

Ah, that explains that particular mystery.

Dodo?

telestra is a total disaster of an telco. not a surprise.

Maybe so, but in this case it looks like Dodo was the one that hosed them.

Since the internet is designed to be as decentralised as possible, it relies on a certain level of trust when it comes to BGP advertisements. In this case Dodo advertised an incorrect routing table upstream to Telstra which then propagated it out as per the protocol.

I am no expert, but it appears that Telstra had the ability to block the kind of erroneous BGP broadcast that Dodo made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com