Global BGP - 2001-06-23 - Vendor X's statement...

Tue Jun 26 18:40:51 UTC 2001

>
> On Tue, 26 June 2001, "Sean Donelan" wrote:
> Sigh, the motto "be liberal in what you accept and
> conservative in what you send" applies to BOTH parties.  The
> failure of one party not to liberally accept what is received
> does not excuse the sending party from being conservative in
> what they send.  And vice-versa.
>
> Just because one vendor has issued a patch does not excuse the other
> vendor.
>

Ahh.. So what it sounds like your saying is: "If some vendor makes a
bug, then the other vendors should quickly change their code to violate
the standards, and accept that bug." I know that cant be the case. :)

There is a very limited and defined space in being liberal here. The RFC
is very clear on the statement - and for very good reason. When someone
sends corrupt information you must send a NOTIFICATION and close the
session. End of story.

For those of you not playing the home game:

   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.  If no
   Error Subcode is specified, then a zero must be used.

   The phrase "the BGP connection is closed" means that the transport
   protocol connection has been closed and that all resources for that
   BGP connection have been deallocated.  Routing table entries
   associated with the remote peer are marked as invalid.  The fact that
   the routes have become invalid is passed to other BGP peers before
   the routes are deleted from the system.

So would you prefer that Vendor X liberally accepted the false
information and propagated it to its other peers? Or would you prefer
that it follows the spec. and protect the global table from false info?

How would you like Vendor X to liberally handle the situation? There is
a point when being too liberal causes issue - like this one. The idea is
that if the original peer followed the spec it would of been contained
at the source and this would of never happened. Where is the line?
Something about GIGO comes to mind.

.chance
(again speaking only for himself)