[ixpmanager] Automating the boring technical emails found on many IXP mailing lists ...

[Nick Hilliard]

Hi Martin,

We've been talking internally about some of these things for quite a while.

- "we're announcing prefix $x": I figure these emails are pointless because
no-one acts on them.  The only reason that people send them out is because
other people send them out.  Do you know anyone who acts on them?  I kinda
maintained some of them for a couple of months in the late 1990s, but
that's about it.

- maintenance: this is an area which we've been looking at for a while and
where we have some definite ideas about how to make it work.

- maxprefixes: currently we monitor this manually.  we plan to allow
members to modify their own settings.  Automatic monitoring is a pain
because we don't have bgp4-mibv2 reliably supported on the route servers.

At INEX we monitor v4 sessions on LAN1 only on our route collector; we
can't monitor v6 sessions and we can't monitor v4/lan2 because that's
running bgp on a vrf-lite which needs bgp4-mibv2.  But this monitoring is
slightly outside the scope of ixp manager.

Nick

On 11/10/2013 16:32, Martin J. Levy wrote:
> I don't know if I should class this a feature request or just a subject
> for discussion. (Maybe we can talk about this in Helsinki).
> 
> I get (as an end-user of many IXPs) lots of emails from members with the
> style I've included at the end. We can discuss many aspects of the value
> of these messages; but they exist. Add to that the classic "We will be
> taking down our router for maintenance at 23:00 ..." messages and we
> have useful data; but sometimes its just classed as noise.
> 
> I'd like to discuss how a central piece of s/w like IXP Manager could
> handle these in a more automated manner.
> 
> For example:
> 
> 1) Use route server filtering to trigger these email's. Does one have to
> assume IRR updates are always valid?
> 2) Use a route announce page (via member login) to list new routes aka
> the email below.
> 3) Use a maintenance page (via member login) to "schedule" a peering
> connection downtime. Use the route server BGP sessions (and/or ping
> and/or SNMP) to measure the up/down times.
> 4) Use route server BGP session review script to handle max-prefix
> settings for member sessions. Allow the member to specific their expect
> max prefixes.
> 
> Each of these would generate an email; however ... two optimization can
> be thought of. A) A digest of events. B) Different levels of information
> to different per member email addresses.
> 
> I'm thinking this could well be useful if there's a way to consolidate
> IXPs or at least provide some consistently. For example some IXPs
> mailing lists are full of emails like the one below; but others are not
> even if the same ISP is connected to various IXPs.