* lorenzo@ripe.net (Lorenzo Colitti) [Fri 04 Mar 2005, 00:09 CET]:
David Schwartz wrote:
Every piece of BGP documentation I have ever seen says that this attribute documents the ASes that the route has actually passed through. I think the above paragraph of RFC 1771 disagrees with you.
Please quote properly; the context was AS_path, not AS_set. David Schwartz was right on the mark here.
You certainly need their permission before you can advertise routes that falsely came to have passed through their network! And yes, I would argue that you do need permission to attach someone else's community string to your routes and that it would be considered at least terribly bad manners to use undocumented community strings from other people's ASes. (Documentation, of course, equates to permission.)
This latter half is nonsense. A community is a 32-bit number with no guarantee of uniqueness; it's up to some kind-hearted fellow network operators to act upon certain `magical' values (apart from well-known ones as no-announce and no-export, of course) that they may have described in an object's remarks in some IRR's database. ASNs are uniquely assigned to autonomous systems; preloading other AS_paths than your own in an advertisement should be frowned upon (just like adding fake Path: entries to your Usenet postings, or adding Received: headers to e-mail if the e-mail in question did not pass through those systems). -- Niels. -- The idle mind is the devil's playground