Who has AS 1712?

Wed Nov 25 04:09:32 UTC 2009

On 2009-11-24, at 20:02, Randy Bush wrote:

>>> Checking "global BGP" only works if the ASN is being announced at that instant.
>> How do you announce an ASN?
> 
> read a basic bgp primer and look at as-path attribute

Right. You can't advertise an ASN; you can only advertise a route and include an AS_PATH attribute on it which makes mention of a particular AS number.

My point is that in the absence of any mechanism for announcing an ASN, a plan to gate assignment of numbers based on an announcement doesn't make any sense.

Even in the loose sense of the phrase that you seem to prefer it's trivial (and arguably legitimate, although I appreciate that not everybody shares my libertarian views on AS_PATH attribute construction) for anybody at all to insert an AS number into an AS_PATH, and for the route bearing that AS_PATH attribute to propagate globally, whatever that means.

So automated checking of "the BGP tables" for "existing announcements of an ASN" doesn't seem very helpful.

> frackin' intentionally silly questions

Apologies for expecting anybody to read beyond the first line of my reply.

Joe