Nick Buraglio of The Forwarding Plane comments:
I’ve blathered on about BGP forever. Say what you will about the venerable protocol, it runs the interwebs, is reliable, extendable and well documented. I’ve also espoused ad nauseam about IPv6, so none of this [admitted] rant should really be a surprise coming from me.
As of 8/12/2014, according to the CIRD report (and many mailing lists), the default free global ipv4 routing table has reached 512k routes. This is a milestone from many perspectives, but more importantly, it solidifies the fact that there is a great deal of equipment in critical points in the internet that is out of date and cannot perform as intended in its current configuration or function.
As technology marches on, we keep finding that our old workarounds don’t hold up as things like global routing tables explode. While there are fixes available, it’s better to understand why the problem exists and why we need to fix it right this time.
Read more at: Aging hardware, IPv6 and the growing route table
