Upstream BGP community support

Sun Nov 1 00:33:52 UTC 2009

On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 06:49:03PM -0500, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> > I'm curious, since when did respecting bounds of contracts and agreements 
> > one has signed become "stodgy"?
> 
> There is no excuse for not being able to tell people where you learned a
> route from (continent, region, city, country, etc). I'm personally of
> the opinion that this is a good thing to share with the entire Internet,
> as it lets people make intelligent TE decisions for your routes even if
> they don't have a direct relationship with your network. You should also
> be able to at a minimum allow no-export or prepend to specific ASNs, and
> not being able to provide these to customers is absolutely grounds for
> "should never ever buy from" status.
> 
> The "we aren't allowed to say we're a peer" argument seems easily
> defeatable, realistically if you're a stodgy tier 1 all you need is
> "this is a customer" tag and you can figure out the rest with "not a
> customer" logic without explicitly violating any NDAs. The "alter export
> attributes within a specific region" argument is a somewhat legitimate
> one due to requirements for consistent announcements, but I prefer to
> enable it by default and deal with unhappy peers on a case by case
> basis.

This is a strawman argument. I never said that any of the above was
a bad thing, nor that transit providers shouldn't support them. They 
should. 

Only point I was addressing was your characterisation that networks
who do support various communities but do not publish those supported
communities were "stodgy" becuase they were doing so due to "silly NDA 
concerns or the like".

Fact is, regardless of whether you or I think it makes any sense or 
not is that some peering agreements preclude disclosure of the locations 
of peering, and in some extreme cases even the disclosure of the 
existance of said peering.

So if you were a party to such an agreement, you can not disclose things
you are bound from doing without breeching the agreement. 

Apologies to the list for the derail,

-dorian