At 02:34 PM 3/27/97 EST, John W. Stewart III wrote:
What is the general concensus about passing communities in the
"community"?
i could see a reason for a subscriber passing communities through a mid-level provider to a top-level provider. but i'm not sure if it makes sense [yet] for top-levels to pass communities between themselves
1. Is COMMUNITY a transitive attribute only between me and my
immediate
upstream supplier or is it being propagated further into Internet (so I can influence how somebody ,say, 5 AS hops away from me sees my routes) ?
the attribute is defined as transitive (i.e., once associated with a route it *stays* associated with the route). however, in
Unless an intermediate provider deliberately changes the value, as opposed to appending to it.
these values aren't an end-to-end thing .. it's simply a way for providers to more easily facilitate routing policies. your comment implies somebody being a bad guy...
Actually, I hadn't necessarily meant to imply "being a bad guy". The comment was meant to show that the "intermediate" ISP has this kind of control over the attribute. In any case, if the decision about whether or not to pass on an attribute (or to modify it) was part of the intermediate ISP's policy, whether or not he/she is a bad guy would depend on varying points of view. Donner
practice, many providers are configured to not send communities to other providers
Is this a conscious decision or just that they have not turned on "send-community"?
both. they don't turn on send-community so that others don't see their communities. maybe they have some whiz-bang features that make configing their neat really cool, and they don't want others to see their communities because it might imply a way for others to do the same thing without the same amount of work
/jws