On Mon, 30 Sep 2002, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In general what this means is rather than having a couple of standard route-map's/route-policies that get configured once and applied to all peers you end up with a per-peer specific configuration. It would seem to me that the opportunity for mistakes is grealy increased. Even if we assume all the people using it really need it, is it worth risking the performance of 500 or 1000 customers for the 5-10 who actually use the features?
Are you talking about the customer or the provider? A provider with a well thought-out community policy shouldn't need per-customer route-maps. The customer sends the provider the appropriate communities and the standard customer route-map takes the appropriate actions. That's one of the major benefits of communities, match on the community not the customer. I see your point about questioning the cost-benefit; however any provider of reasonable size needs a community policy anyway, so most of the cost is unavoidable. If done right it only needs to be incurred once. A customer, on the other hand, will of course need separate policy per transit to take advantage of provider-specific TE communities. For the typical multi-homed customer with a few upstreams this is hardly unmanageable. Bradley