neighbor x.x.x.x shutdown will stop you from having to delete the neighbor completely therefore avoid risks like this.
Christian & NANOG in general:
Our apologies for the BGP problem. We turned down our peering with UUNET today due to serious routing problems in Raleigh NC. When our NOC personnel reestablised the peering, they failed to utilize the peer-group that includes all of our outbound route filtering. Additional documentation and training will be implemented Monday - in the interim any BGP alterations will be performed by Backbone Engineering.
We will audit our RA entries and verify that all of our routing data is present and correct.
Tim McKee, Chief Technology Officer Info Avenue Internet Services, LLC
-- Neil J. McRae - Alive and Kicking. neil@DOMINO.ORG