nanog mailing list archives

Re: Lots of prepends - AS20912 case


From: Dorn Hetzel <dhetzel () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:51:26 -0500

Replacing what is conventially thought to be a string with an integer
multiplier seems a massive violation of the principle of least astonishment.

On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org> wrote:

On Fri, 20 Feb 2009, Giuliano Peritore wrote:

       The problem is that differently to Cisco the syntax of the prepend
field on thius system is not a string (eg. "20912 20912 20912") but an
integer, that the user interface _should_ limit to the interval 0-16.

...

      The producer has been warned about the problem, which I can't
completely define as a "bug"... but the lack of a user configuration helper
(syntax checker).


More important than whether or not to consider this a bug, it seems a very
shortsighted way to support prepending.  If your prepend "field" is an
integer controlling how many times to prepend, how do you control which
ASN(s) or even AS Paths are prepended?  It sounds like you probably can't.
As has been discussed recently, there are cases where you might want to
prepend a creative AS Path for traffic engineering purposes to force certain
routes/paths to be ignored by certain ASNs.

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