What's with all the long aspaths?

Thu Oct 23 19:33:28 UTC 2008

On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Philip Smith wrote:

> Jon Lewis said the following on 23/10/08 12:39:
>> Is there something silly going around?  I doubt I'm the only one
>> noticing these being triggered by our generous maxas-limit setting.
>>
>> Oct  9 23:01:46: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 27754 27754 27754 ...
>> Oct 17 11:10:40: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 43413 43413 43413 ...
>> Oct 22 06:34:09: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 38230 38230 38230 ...
>>
>> Anyone have theories as to what these networks are trying to accomplish?
>
> Theories include:
>
> - trying to make a /20 announcement more important than a component /24
> by prepending the /24 out of sight (i'm not joking, some people really
> believe this!!)
>
> - trying to over-ride policy that their upstream provider has applied
> (e.g. my prepended /20 is a backup to my main /20 announcement but my
> upstream on the backup path is local pref-ing high to make them look
> more "peerable")
>
> There are bound to be other reasons... :-)

My theory - some netadmin trying to see if anything bad happens when he 
does it.  Sort of like the Darwin winner who's last words are "I wonder 
what would happen if I tri..."

-Hank