Heads up: Long AS-sets announced in the next few days

Tue Mar 1 18:49:50 UTC 2005

Hi,

as announced to the RIPE routing working group mailing list [1] and 
elsewhere, over the next few days the Computer Networks research group 
at Roma Tre University, in collaboration with the RIPE NCC RIS project, 
will be performing experiments involving announcements with large 
AS-sets in the AS-path. We are doing this to test innovative network 
discovery methodologies we developed to allow ISPs to determine how 
their prefixes are seen by the rest of the Internet. The announcements 
will be for prefixes 84.205.73.0/24 and 84.205.89.0/24 and will 
originate in AS12654.

We have been performing similar experiments over IPv6, in collaboration 
with the NAMEX internet exchange, since December 2004 with no ill 
effects; furthermore, our announcements are standard BGP, so conformant 
implementations should be able to process them, and very long AS-sets 
have already been observed in the past (e.g. [2], [3]). However, we want 
to be careful to avoid router bugs on legacy devices, old firmware 
versions and the like, so we are first sending out test announcements 
with progressively longer AS-sets. Should you encounter a problem with 
these advertisements, please let us know and we will withdraw them.

The proposed timetable of the test announcements is as follows.

2005-03-04:
	14:00 UTC: 10-element AS-set
	14:30 UTC: withdrawal
	16:00 UTC: 25-element AS-set
	16:30 UTC: withdrawal

and, if there are no problems:

2005-03-07:
	14:00 UTC: 50-element AS-set
	14:30 UTC: withdrawal
	16:00 UTC: 100-element AS-set
	16:30 UTC: withdrawal

Note: For reference, the AS-sets already observed in [2] and [3] 
contained 123 and 124 ASes respectively.

For questions/comments, please contact compunet at dia.uniroma3.it or 
lorenzo at ripe.net.

Regards,
Lorenzo Colitti
On behalf of the Roma Tre Computer Networks Research group

[1] 
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/maillists/archives/routing-wg/2005/msg00021.html
[2] http://www.ripe.net/projects/ris/Talks/0101_RIPE38_AA/sld003.html
[3] http://www.ripe.net/maillists/ncc-archives/ris-users/2002/msg00044.html