[8375] in North American Network Operators' Group
BGP4 COMMUNITY attribute
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Walter Towbin)
Thu Mar 27 13:31:32 1997
From: Walter Towbin <Walter.Towbin@TELUS.COM>
To: "'nanog@merit.edu'" <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 11:24:33 -0700
In the preparation for upcoming 2nd (multihomed) connection to Internet
I am looking into
COMMUNITY attribute of BGP4 as a way (in conjunction with my own
LOCAL_PREF) of load balancing
traffic between my two internet links (both T3). After reading CISCO
documentation I am still not
clear on some issues:
1. Is COMMUNITY a transitive attribute only between me and my immediate
upstream supplier or
is it being propagated further into Internet (so I can influence how
somebody ,say, 5 AS hops
away from me sees my routes) ?
2. If COMMUNITY propagates into big I, and I set COMMUNITY to 3561:70
(for MCI to set
LOCAL_PREF on my routes to 70) and my next hop supplier sets COMMUNITY
of my routes to
3561:80, what happens ? what MCI is going to do ?
3. Is COMMUNITY a CISCO only or is it part of RFC ? Has any other router
vendor implemented
this parameter ?
4. Which major Internet providers have COMMUNITY/LOCAL_PREF implemented
(I am aware of MCI and Sprint) ?
5. Your experiences, comments, suggestions .....
Thanks in advance, Walter
Walter Towbin
Telus Advanced Communications
phone: 403-543-2032, fax: 403-543-2030, cell: 403-620-0019
walter.towbin@telus.com
