Re: Did your BGP crash today?

[Jared Mauch <jared () puck nether net>]

On Aug 27, 2010, at 3:17 PM, Jeroen Massar wrote:

> On 2010-08-27 21:13, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> > On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 01:29:15PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
> > > Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240)
> > > Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240)
> > > Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240)
> > > Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240)
> > > Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240)
> >
> > Just out of curiosity, at what point will we as operators rise up 
> > against the ivory tower protocol designers at the IETF and demand that 
> > they add a mechanism to not bring down the entire BGP session because of 
> > a single malformed attribute? Did I miss the memo about the meeting? 
> > I'll bring the punch and pie.
>
> Complain to your vendor, especially C & J are having good enough
> influence on the IETF to make such a change possible.
>
>
> I can agree with tearing the session down when one encounters an
> improperly formatted message, but an unknown attribute, while the rest
> of the format of message is fine, is a silly thing to hang up on indeed.

When you are processing something, it's sometimes hard to tell if something
just was mis-parsed (as I think the case is here with the "missing-2-bytes")
vs just getting garbage.  Perhaps there should be some way to "re-sync" when
you are having this problem, or a parallel "keepalive" path similar to
MACA/MCAS/MIDCAS/TCAS between the devices to talk when something bad is
happening.

- Jared