BGP Community Attribute Support: Summary
Joe Abley
jabley at automagic.org
Mon Apr 2 01:57:27 UTC 2001
The other week, I asked:
On Sat, Mar 24, 2001 at 10:25:35PM -0500, Joe Abley wrote:
> Quick poll: does any operator here currently use a router which does
> not support setting BGP community attributes, does not permit community
> attributes to be matched exactly when doing ingress/egress route
> filtering, or does not permit wildcard matches on the last two octets
> (e.g. "permit 1234:*")?
These were pretty targeted questions, and what I have largely heard
is silence. Hence either these three capabilities have widespread
support, or people just didn't find the question interesting enough
to reply to.
I guess I shouldn't start designing surveys for a living :)
Anyway, a couple of people said there was interest in a results
summary, so here are the main points:
+ gated 3.6 public doesn't support setting community attributes
but will pass them on unscathed, as you'd hope;
+ "Extreme networks equipment" does not support the wildcard
community match, although the person who told me that had only
limited experience with the product range;
I also happened to ask a few people about specific platforms, and
found out:
+ the Nortel shasta and bay RS platforms support those three
capabilities
+ zebra supports all three capabilities (the wildcard match function
is in version 0.91a, based on a patch by Rick Payne)
I was already confident I could do all three things on juniper and
cisco boxes, although I didn't bother to analyse which IOS/JUNOS
versions would definitely support all three.
One correspondant (working for a vendor) lamented the lack of clear
guidelines on what base functionality should be supported by bgp
speakers at all in relation to manipulating community attributes,
and suggested a more general poll might be useful for that reason.
The reason for asking about those three particular capabilities
was to search for platforms that would have trouble doing this:
http://www.automagic.org/~jabley/draft-jabley-edge-policy-propagation-control-01.txt
Thanks,
Joe
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