Did your BGP crash today?

Fri Aug 27 20:43:39 UTC 2010

On Aug 27, 2010, at 12:13 PM, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:

> 
> Just out of curiosity, at what point will we as operators rise up 
> against the ivory tower protocol designers at the IETF and demand that 
> they add a mechanism to not bring down the entire BGP session because of 
> a single malformed attribute? Did I miss the memo about the meeting? 
> I'll bring the punch and pie.

About the same time vendors' BGP implementations start to work correctly?

I agree such a knob would be useful, but seems to me that actually following the current standard would largely curb the issue by itself.

I recall one of the previous times something like this happened (and with a much wider impact), I believe it was $C that was accepting a bad attribute and passing it along. The effect was that other vendors ($F in particular, I think) would drop the session (per RFC), which made it look like they were the broken ones. Instead of saying "why was this accepted from its source?" the community reaction seemed more to me to be "hey, BGP is breaking the internet!"

If -everyone- dropped the session on a bad attribute, it likely wouldn't make it far enough into the wild to cause these problems in the first place.

-c