Hi Job,
Older versions of Junos incorrectly interpret the first byte of the Shutdown Communication as a character in the message, instead as the length field.
Thanks, I can confirm this. I sent a valid cease NOTIFICATION message: Border Gateway Protocol - NOTIFICATION Message Marker: ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff Length: 33 Type: NOTIFICATION Message (3) Major error Code: Cease (6) Minor error Code (Cease): Administratively Shutdown (2) BGP Shutdown Communication Length: 11 Shutdown Communication: maintenance ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff .............. ff ff 00 21 03 06 02 0b 6d 61 69 6e 74 65 6e 61 ...!....maintena 6e 63 65 nce .. to a lab router running the same Junos version 21.4R3-S3.4 as our production edge routers and the Junos indeed interpreted the 0x0b seen in the hex dump above as a first character of the message, rather than the length of the Shutdown Communication field. However, I also noticed that one can deliberately/accidentally inject control characters to Shutdown Communication field and Junos would return those control characters in its NETCONF response. For example, let's say that I send a following valid cease NOTIFICATION message to a Juniper router running Junos version 25.2R1.9: Border Gateway Protocol - NOTIFICATION Message Marker: ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff Length: 34 Type: NOTIFICATION Message (3) Major error Code: Cease (6) Minor error Code (Cease): Administratively Shutdown (2) BGP Shutdown Communication Length: 12 Shutdown Communication: \vmaintenance ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff ff .............. ff ff 00 22 03 06 02 0c 0b 6d 61 69 6e 74 65 6e ...".....mainten 61 6e 63 65 ance As seen above, the 0x0c is the length of the Shutdown Communication field in octets and the "0b 6d 61 69 6e 74 65 6e 61 6e 63 65" is the message. Calling the "get-bgp-neighbor-information" or "get-bgp-summary-information" RPC on that router would include the character 0x0b, which is invalid in XML 1.0. Martin