Perhaps you should reread the original message regarding issues associated with honoring undocumented/misrepresented AS Paths.. As for what you mention below, perhaps you should have a look at the document referenced in the latter portion of my original message. I can say from several years of Operational experience, what you suggest below, in the context it's in, isn't a very good idea. There are much more intelligent mechanisms to obtain desired ingress and egress traffic distribution.. Now, perhaps applying policies or the like based on AS_PATH would be reasonable to some extent, but suppressing or manipulating specific path entries is only asking for trouble. Bedsides that, I'm not aware of any router vendor shipping code that would do anything along these lines, with the exception of the "private-AS" stuff that some support.. -danny Terence wrote:

It's very useful if you want to keep a link rather free of traffic in case of a backup service from another NSP, and then when your big pipe goes down, you have this other service with routes intact ready to roll without intervention.