On Jan 12, 2009, at 4:12 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
On 2009-01-12, at 15:39, Florian Weimer wrote:
So does "academic" mean "unethical" these days?
I think this is over the line. You can't put other people's IDs into routing data on production networks. (Well, technically you can, obviously, but you shouldn't.)
The AS_PATH attribute is a loop-avoidance mechanism, not a signature on a cheque.
AS_PATH prepending with your own and with others' AS numbers (the latter intended to effect "don't let this prefix leak into that AS") has been sitting in the inter-domain traffic engineering toolbox for years.
I see no lack of ethics in the simple act of the as-path prepend as part of a route export policy.
People have been doing it forever. However, it has been considered sketchy at best. If this were not Randy doing a research project, but, say, Cogent prepending the ASN of $LATEST_DEPEERED_NETWORK on announcements to Verio, how different would the tone of this thread have been? If A cannot / should not do it, then the same should go for B. -- TTFN, patrick