HE.net and BGP Communities

Mon Jul 25 14:23:28 UTC 2022

I do understand the reasoning behind preferring customer routes.   However
in the case where a customer of a customer also connects to you directly
via peering doesn't it make sense to prefer the direct connection?  or at
least not prefer the customer learned routes.

In our situation, we were buying transit, heavily prepended, from a
provider on a tiny circuit.   The purpose of the transit was related to
another service we were acquiring from that provider and wasn't about the
transit, but the  transit was needed for the service to work reliably.
 Unfortunately this provider was also a HE customer and so we now had all
of the HE traffic coming down this tiny link, since all of our other
transit providers and ourselves only peered with HE.

I don't remember why,  but we couldn't have the transit provider not
announce our routes toward HE, so we ended up doing the announce more
specifics everywhere else thing.   Which I hate doing on so many levels.

Thus the desire for a community to tell HE that although they learned this
route from a customer, it is not a customer route.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 5:21 AM Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:

> You always want to prefer customer routes over non customer routes as a
> service provider. Of course having a robust set of communities to let
> adjustments happen helps.
>
> Without proper tiering of routes you may see unstable routing.
>
> Having a standard set of customer, peer, transit set of local preferences
> would go a long way. Same for geographic scope of routes, only use these on
> same continent. Makes using a provider if you do something like anycast
> hard if they haul you long distance.
>
> - Jared
>
> Sent via RFC1925 compliant device
>
> On Jul 25, 2022, at 6:49 AM, Forrest Christian (List Account) <
> lists at packetflux.com> wrote:
>
> 
> I wish they'd add one more that turns off their "prefer routes learned
> from a customer" rule.   I'm having to split my blocks in half and announce
> them that way to get them to send my traffic directly to me through our IX
> peering session as opposed to one of my transit providers.
>
> I'd rather they just let shortest path selection work.
>
> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 1:43 PM Siyuan Miao <aveline at misaka.io> wrote:
>
>> They do have BGP communities ... but for black-hole only :-(
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 24, 2022 at 9:39 PM Ryan Hamel <administrator at rkhtech.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Yes.
>>>
>>> Ryan
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+ryan=rkhtech.org at nanog.org> On Behalf Of
>>> Rubens Kuhl
>>> Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2022 12:36 PM
>>> To: Nanog <nanog at nanog.org>
>>> Subject: HE.net and BGP Communities
>>>
>>> The last mention I found on NANOG about HE.net and BGP communities for
>>> traffic engineering is from April 2021 and said they provided none.
>>>
>>> Is that still the case a year later ?
>>>
>>>
>>> Rubens
>>>
>>>
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