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Re: Did your BGP crash today?


From: Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>
Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 09:23:49 +0200 (CEST)

On Sat, 28 Aug 2010, Brett Frankenberger wrote:

The implementor is to blame becuase the code he wrote send out BGP messages which were not properly formed.

People talk about not dropping sessions but instead dropping malformed messages. This is not safe. We've seen ISIS (which is TLV based and *can* drop individual messages) been wrongly implemented and platforms drop the entire ISIS *packet* instead of the individual message when seeing something malformed (or rather in this case, ISIS multi topology which the implementation didn't understand), and this made the link state database go out of sync and miss information for things it actually should have understood.

This was *silent* error/corruption. I'm not sure I prefer to have silent problems instead of tearing down the session which is definitely noticable.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se


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