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by toomuchtodo 4507 days ago
I would kill for a Null Route REST API at peering points/network upstream providers.
1 comments

The reason the internet is still online is because people who would ask for this type of thing don't have access to it.

Routers shouldn't speak HTTP. People who don't know how to use blackhole communities have no business controlling them.

People who don't know how to use blackhole communities have no business controlling them.

What's a "blackhole community"? (I did Google, but found email messages from 2003 on page one. Surely there are better references?)

Thank you, commenters like you are why the HN community rocks.
You're welcome! Not a problem at all.
Your routers wouldn't speak HTTP. Your web service endpoint would talk to your network management middleware, which would then issue your respective IOS/NXOS/JunOS commands to your core or edge gear.

You'd grant your customers the ability to null route traffic from IP blocks (/24 or larger, because ain't nobody got memory to route blocks smaller than that in IPv4) so they wouldn't saturate their links with useless traffic. There was a discussion on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailing list a few weeks ago.

Disclaimer: I have operated large-scale networks for over a decade.

Sorry, but I call shenanigans on your having operated a large scale network.

Every carrier worth its salt will already let you use blackhole communities to mitigate attacks. You tag it, it gets dropped at the edge of your upstreams networks. Simple and effective. You don't need a web service or middleware for any of this.

Also, a route and netmask (generally) take exactly the same amount of memory regardless of the size of the network you're covering.

If you want to meet me at the next NANOG conference, I can send you my personal email address to get in touch.