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

Thu Mar 3 16:11:04 UTC 2005

On 2 Mar 2005, at 22:30, David Schwartz wrote:

> 	Please just clarify the following point: do you intend to advertise 
> paths
> containing AS numbers belonging to other entities on the public 
> Internet
> without the permission of the owners of those AS numbers? You admit 
> that you
> don't know what the consequences of this injection will be.

Prepending announcements with remote AS numbers has been a well-known 
technique for preventing prefixes from propagating to particular ASes 
for a long time.

The AS_PATH attribute is a loop detection mechanism, and a determinant 
in path selection. What other magic is there in it that requires such 
careful consideration? Why should anybody need to get permission from 
remote operators before deciding what attributes to include in their 
own advertisements?

Do I need to get permission from Sprint before I include 1239:100 as a 
community-string attribute on my own advertisement, too?

> 	It seems to me that there are enough issues with this type of
> experimentation *with* the permission of the AS numbers you plan to 
> use. But
> the ethical issues with using them without such permission seems to me 
> to be
> insurmountable.

The ethical issues seem to be non-existent, to my way of thinking, and 
hence trivial to surmount :-)

Joe