I see that I have elicited some interesting responses <insert evil cackle here>. I agree with removing cruftery (thanks for point out something that is quite valid Vijay). Lets talk about a couple things. 1. How can everyone protect themselves RIGHT NOW. 2. A couple vendors that I know of decide to either restart routing entirely or in the least restart more than 1 BGP session. This behaviour should be considered BAD. This behaviour generally can not be corrected quickly because new code releases take time. 3. The vendor who starts the nastiness seems to be the only one who can't quite seem to grasp that the sort of behaviour that engenders corrupt AS paths is BAD. So, in light of the above statements. Would it be safe to say that safeguarding the Internet is our first duty and beating up on vendors is our second? Please note that I enjoy abusing vendors but they tend to get worn out <grin>. Note; I will caveat all statements by saying that some vendors claim to have fixed this in later versions of code. I concurr regarding the route-servers. However, just about everything else is free game. Who besides a route-server would want to prepend an AS besides their own. Who wants to allow customers and perhaps even peers to send routes prepending an AS that is not their own? I would side with Vijay on the withdrawl issue. Since the route update that was received was malformed we should treat all announcements from the EBGP peer with extreme suspicion. Reseting the BGP session (perhaps tearing it down and leaving it down until a human intervenes) is probably the best idea. A note of interest for the events I have seen is that you do not necessarily have the BGP session you expect torn down. Wouldn't you expect to tear down your EBGP session with the person who sent the weirdness? I can assure you that several vendors do not do things this way. In fact the vendors I am thinking of quite obviously propagate the bad route AND THEN decide to reset their BGP on a larger scale<grrrr>. Just some additional thoughts... Regards, Blaine On Tue, 23 May 2000, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Peter T. Whiting <pwhiting@fury.ittc.ukans.edu> wrote:
As I understand the current spec, a router, upon receiving a malformed as_path is supposed to respond with a notification message (3.11) and drop the BGP connection. Your suggestion to maintain the connection and drop the announcement is a practical one, but doesn't put as much pressure on vendors to fix the bug.
This is not only practical, but, in fact, the only sane way to do things. Dropping BGP session causes withdrawal of hundreds or thousands of acceptable routes. When the BGP session is reestablished, these routes will be acquired again, causing a wave of announcements. When the invalid route shows up, the cycle is repeated.
What a perfect way to kill the Internet :)
--vadim