No one behind the wheel at WorldCom

Sat Jul 13 22:31:41 UTC 2002

On Saturday, July 13, 2002, at 06:17 , Stephen Stuart wrote:

>> Legend speaks of a well known BGP community referred to as 'no export',
>> which causes people with no direct connections to $carrier to not
>> have to listen to all that extra junk while still engineering inbound
>> traffic w/ more specifics for people who peer directly in diverse
>> locations.   Amazing!
>
> Indeed, I know from personal experience the heartbreak of supplying
> no-export to a BGP peer who does not honor it, and propagates the
> more-specific prefixes that I give them globally.

The earlier comment made reference to 1221's prestigious and long-held 
position at the top of the CIDR report.

Rumour has it that the deaggregated set of long-prefix routes advertised 
by 1221 to its peers and transit providers is there because of the 
requirement of 1221 to balance inbound traffic from ASes with which 1221 
does not directly peer (as in BGP), over an array of random legacy 
transmission capacity under and around the Pacific. It is not obvious 
how no-export helps with this general problem (although see 
draft-ietf-ptomaine-nopeer-00).

[I am not now, nor have I ever been involved in designing or applying 
routing policy for AS1221, but I have been known to drink the occasional 
beer with people who have.]

Joe