nanog mailing list archives

Re: HE.net BGP origin attribute rewriting


From: Daniel Suchy <danny () danysek cz>
Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2012 09:27:36 +0200

On 06/02/2012 02:53 AM, Joe Provo wrote:
Cost and performance were merely two reasons someone may wish to prevent
remote parties from using origin to influence outbound traffic from my 
network. 
As I mentioned already, it will influence that by another way. And this
costs *you* more money - you have to pay for router with larger TCAMs,
more memory, faster CPUs... and yes, deaggregation is very simple task
for originating network - much easier than playing with the origin flag,
which is not understanded widely.

I can state it is not imagination when I encountered networks
doing this in the past for prefixes they were sourcing. To be clear - 
these were prefixes being sourced by a neighbor who was providing 
different origin codes on different sessions. Either they were [to
Nick Hilliard's point] using different kit and unaware of the differnt
implementations or [as evidence bore out] purposefully shifting traffic
without arrangement on links that were worse for me and in violation 
of the agreement we entered into when peering.

More specific prefix in addition to aggregate one visible only over
specific peers will do the job, too. And will do that job better... but
for what cost (not only to you)...?

There certainly were historical reasons for treating origin as sacrosanct.
Time has marched on and those reasons are now *historical*, hence the 
quite reasonable updat eto the RFC. You seem to fail to understand that 
MED comes after origin on the decision tree, and therefore someone can 
influence traffic carriage without agreement.

You seem to fail realize other (easier) ways to influence traffic
carriage. Deaggregation with selective route announcement is quite
common way, many networks do that.

- Daniel


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