[78419] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Heads up: Long AS-sets announced in the next few days
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Niels Bakker)
Thu Mar 3 18:25:09 2005
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 00:24:40 +0100
From: Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Mail-Followup-To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <42279938.2070307@ripe.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
* lorenzo@ripe.net (Lorenzo Colitti) [Fri 04 Mar 2005, 00:09 CET]:
> David Schwartz wrote:
>> Every piece of BGP documentation I have ever seen says that this
>> attribute documents the ASes that the route has actually passed
>> through.
> I think the above paragraph of RFC 1771 disagrees with you.
Please quote properly; the context was AS_path, not AS_set.
David Schwartz was right on the mark here.
>> You certainly need their permission before you can advertise routes
>> that falsely came to have passed through their network! And yes, I
>> would argue that you do need permission to attach someone else's
>> community string to your routes and that it would be considered at
>> least terribly bad manners to use undocumented community strings from
>> other people's ASes. (Documentation, of course, equates to permission.)
This latter half is nonsense. A community is a 32-bit number with no
guarantee of uniqueness; it's up to some kind-hearted fellow network
operators to act upon certain `magical' values (apart from well-known
ones as no-announce and no-export, of course) that they may have
described in an object's remarks in some IRR's database. ASNs are
uniquely assigned to autonomous systems; preloading other AS_paths than
your own in an advertisement should be frowned upon (just like adding
fake Path: entries to your Usenet postings, or adding Received: headers
to e-mail if the e-mail in question did not pass through those systems).
-- Niels.
--
The idle mind is the devil's playground
