On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 3:56 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 12:30 PM Warren Kumari <warren@kumari.net> wrote:

So, let's say I'm announcing some address space (e.g 192.0.2.0/24), but I'm only using part of it internally (e.g 192.0.2.0/25). I've always understood that it's best practice[0] to have a discard route (eg static to null0/discard or similar[1]) for what I'm announcing.

Hi Warren,

Your router won't announce 192.0.2.0/24 unless it knows a route to 192.0.2.0/24 or has been configured to aggregate any internal routes inside 192.0.2.0/24 to 192.0.2.0/24.

It that always true? I'd started off thinking that, but a friend of mine (yes, the same one that started this  argument) convinced me that some forms of BGP summarization/aggregation don't always generate a "local" route…

I'd also thought that I'd seen this when redistributing an IGP into BGP, and using that as a contributor to 'aggregate-address' on Cisco devices. This is from a long time ago, and really hazy now, but I'd thought that any contributor would cause that the aggregate-address route to be announced, and a local hold down not to be created.  It's possible that a: I'm just wrong b: this is not longer true, c: both of the above.

There are also some more inventive ways of getting routes into BGP, like using ExaBGP as an example.

W

192.0.2.0/25 doesn't count; it needs to know a route to 192.0.2.0/24. Sending 192.0.2.0/24 to discard guarantees that the router has a route to 192.0.2.0/24.

Historically, folks would put 192.0.2.0/24 on the ethernet port. Then, when carrier was lost on the ethernet port for a moment, the router would no longer have a route to 192.0.2.0/24, so it'd withdraw the announcement for 192.0.2.0/24. This is a bad idea for obvious reasons, so best practice was to put a low priority route to discard as a fall-back if the ethernet port briefly lost carrier.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
William Herrin
bill@herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/