4-Byte AS Number soon to come?

Tue Aug 23 13:40:01 UTC 2005

On 23-aug-2005, at 15:16, Paul Jakma wrote:

>> then i would prefer going ahead with the new solution and picking  
>> it up if it works!

> Well, in order to justify the hassle of invalidating existing  
> implementations of the draft as it stands, I suspect there'd need  
> to be sufficient examples of real-world problems with passive BGP  
> 'readers' to get consensus in IDR to change.

This is exactly why people shouldn't implement drafts except possibly  
as a private in-house feasibility study. There has been a huge  
inflation of the status of various IETF documents, to the degree than  
BGP today apparently isn't considered mature enough to be an  
"internet standard".

BTW, I find the notion that there is a new attribute that carries 32- 
bit AS numbers while at the same time the original AS path can either  
hold 16-bit or 32-bit AS numbers depending on the capabilities of the  
peer rather strange. Why not simply keep the current AS path 16 bits  
and create a new 32-bit one?

And what's with that "octet" thing, anyway.