Network geek here: > Many are the tales of some small company misconfiguring their edge routers slightly (say a 1 char typo) and having the entire internet rou

Network geek here: > Many are the tales of some small company misconfiguring their edge routers slightly (say a 1 char typo) and having the entire internet route through their T1, across their lan, out their backup T1. This is what route filters are for. If you peer with someone and they advertise 0.0.0.0/0 or something equally ridiculous, and you accept this as a valid route then you deserve to fail (and then given a firm stare if you then proceed to advertise it to other peers). A similar fail on the part of Telstra (http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=554 http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=554) was to blame for much of Australia dropping off the map earlier this year. Also: > Just at the IP level they have to deal with (at the edges and across substantial WANS) BGP - a notoriously ugly and fragile protocol. I take offence at this. 80% of BGP related issues are due to misconfiguration by a given party, 19% is due to bad or missing route filters and the other 1% is due to bugs in router software. The actual implementation of BGP v4, originally designed back in the early 90's isn't completely without it's issues and behavioural quirks (I'm looking at you, route flaps) but the theory/algorithm behind is a work of art, and has coped amazingly with explosive growth, and growth that's only going to increase with IPv6. Without it, there would be no HN