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...
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