This page has compiled community guides from several network operators. Looks like a good resource. https://onestep.net/communities/ Gaël On Thu 22 Jan 2026 at 22:08, John Fraizer via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Read RFC1997 and RFC1998 for more info n depth understanding of communities and their value/use.
-- John Fraizer LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfraizer/
On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 5:02 PM William Herrin via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
IIUC, a "route map" is a configuration local to the BGP router. So, an operator may make some decision about the meaning of a community and
On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 1:55 PM Ronan Pigott <ronan@rjp.ie> wrote: then
attach it to routes advertised to their peers, but no peer can reasonably act on the community information without understanding the meaning intended by the owner, right?
Correct.
So if I operated a network and my BGP peer advertises routes that belong to a bunch of communities, how can I possibly learn the intended meaning of those communities to configure a sensible route map for my router?
You ask your peer. In some cases, the peer writes a web page which explains what their communities mean so that they can just say, "look at this web page." And then you have sites like bgp.tools which collect the information from the various web pages individual networks have published into a large database.
Because the communities have arbitrary meanings, those meanings are communicated person to person, not machine to machine.
Regards, Bill Herrin
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