Anyone notice strange announcements for 174.128.31.0/24

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Mon Jan 12 21:16:00 UTC 2009


On Jan 12, 2009, at 4:12 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
> On 2009-01-12, at 15:39, Florian Weimer wrote:
>
>> So does "academic" mean "unethical" these days?
>>
>> I think this is over the line.  You can't put other people's IDs into
>> routing data on production networks.  (Well, technically you can,
>> obviously, but you shouldn't.)
>
> The AS_PATH attribute is a loop-avoidance mechanism, not a signature  
> on a cheque.
>
> AS_PATH prepending with your own and with others' AS numbers (the  
> latter intended to effect "don't let this prefix leak into that AS")  
> has been sitting in the inter-domain traffic engineering toolbox for  
> years.
>
> I see no lack of ethics in the simple act of the as-path prepend as  
> part of a route export policy.

People have been doing it forever.  However, it has been considered  
sketchy at best.

If this were not Randy doing a research project, but, say, Cogent  
prepending the ASN of $LATEST_DEPEERED_NETWORK on announcements to  
Verio, how different would the tone of this thread have been?

If A cannot / should not do it, then the same should go for B.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick





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