Re: Heads up: Long AS-sets announced in the next few days

[Niels Bakker <niels=nanog () bakker net>]

* 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