RE: bgp update destroying transit on redback routers ?

[Jeff Tantsura <jeff.tantsura () ericsson com>]

Hi Alexandre,

You are right, the behavior is exactly as per RFC4271 section 6:
"When any of the conditions described here are detected, a
NOTIFICATION message, with the indicated Error Code, Error Subcode, and Data fields, is sent, and the BGP connection is 
closed.
So because ASN 0 in AGGREGATOR is seen as a malformed UPDATE we send 3/9 and close the connection.

Ideally it should be treated as "treat-as-withdraw" as per draft-chen-ebgp-error-handling, however please note - this 
is still a draft, 
not a normative document and with all my support it takes time to implement.

Once again, we understand the implications for our customers and hence going to disable ASN 0 check.

P.S. We have strong evidence that the update in question was caused by a bug on a freshly updated router (I'm not going 
to disclose the vendor) 

Regards,
Jeff


-----Original Message-----
From: Alexandre Snarskii [mailto:snar () snar spb ru] 
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2011 6:36 AM
To: Jeff Tantsura
Cc: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: bgp update destroying transit on redback routers ?

On Thu, Dec 01, 2011 at 04:56:43PM -0500, Jeff Tantsura wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Let me take it over from now on, I'm the IP Routing/MPLS Product 
> Manager at Ericsson responsible for all routing protocols.
> There's nothing wrong in checking ASN in AGGREGATOR, we don't really 
> want see ASN 0 anywhere, that's how draft-wkumari-idr-as0 
> (draft-ietf-idr-as0-00) came into the worlds.

This draft says that

If a BGP speaker receives a route which has an AS number of zero in the AS_PATH (or AS4_PATH) attribute, it SHOULD be 
logged and treated as a WITHDRAW. This same behavior applies to routes containing zero as the Aggregator or AS4 
Aggregator.

but observed behaviour was more like following: 

If a BGP speaker receives [bad route] it MUST close session immediately with NOTIFICATION Error Code 'Update Message 
Error' and subcode 'Error with optional attribute'.

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. 
But, in practice, there is.