Hi, The IDR draft is awaiting implementation report. There are apparently two implementations, one with field deployment, which suffices to move the draft forward. I happen to have one concern about the draft, and I'd like to ask on NANOG to find out whether or not my concern is of actual operational significance (ie significant enough to revise the draft and start again on implementations): How important is the operational use of BGP protocol analysers? Is it common or uncommon to fire up 'ethereal' or 'tcpdump' to debug a BGP problem? Would it be problematic to have to either a) clear sessions for your analyser to fully understand the BGP stream or b) tell your analyser whether the flow uses 2 or 4 byte ASNs? Do you ever have an operational need to watch several BGP flows at the same time? Are there any other operational uses for tools which *passively* read BGP besides debug? Eg, passive gathering of BGP data, a 'BGP IDS'? Are these used at all? Essentially, this draft as it stands is going to make it difficult to observe and comprehend BGP AS_PATH without either human intervention or restart of the session(s) concerned. A guage how much of a problem this would be in real-life (if any problem at all?) would be useful in determining whether it's worth lobbying to change the draft. Thanks. regards, -- Paul Jakma paul@clubi.ie paul@jakma.org Key ID: 64A2FF6A Fortune: Piece of cake! -- G.S. Koblas