HE.net BGP origin attribute rewriting

Fri Jun 1 18:03:50 UTC 2012

On 06/01/2012 07:38 PM, Joe Provo wrote:
> You clearly did not read the previous posts involving actual historical 
> evidence [and apparently ongoing] of remote networks attempting action 
> at a distance knowing that many overlook this part of the decision tree.
> Preventing your company from bleeding money or degrading performance at
> whim of remote parties certainly is "cool" but also just good business
> and proper network hygiene.

By overwriting origin field, there's no warranty that someone improves
performance at all - it's just imagination. In extreme cases,
performance can be degraded when someone in the middle plays with origin
field and doesn't know reasons, why originating network uses something
else than IGP origin. In RFC 2119 words, full implications were not
understanded - when this overwriting is done generally.

Also, there must be some historical reason, why origin should not be
rewritten (this changed in January 2006). For internal reasons within
the network operator still haves enough knobs to enforce own policy (by
setting localpref, med on his network).

Daniel