BGP communities usage for route origin, entry point
This started off as me being curious as to why a UUNet engineer I was talking to told me he could not understand why a network would support a feature such as BGP communities for identifying the origin of a route/network entry point. I tried to explain to him the advantage of being able to quickly identify where a route originates from (geographically), type of interconnect, type of "peer" (in this case I use peer for any BGP peer, customer or transit). I explained that it could be usefull for debugging and gaining more background info (route analysis is one of my favorite tasks) and some of the major and minor networks do provide such a feature/service. Still the engineer could not understand why and only saw this as a security issue, well I guess when you work for a network that does not provide any public looking glass or route server it's not really a surprise </rant> This triggered a thought, do many people actually use BGP communities to pinpoint a route origination point/type, and if so for what purpose (debugging, analysis, other) Thomas PS: If UUNet do actually support this feature please tell me who I should contact.
TK> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 20:13:50 -0400 TK> From: Thomas Kernen TK> This triggered a thought, do many people actually use BGP TK> communities to pinpoint a route origination point/type, and TK> if so for what purpose (debugging, analysis, other) Analysis and mild tuning. Perhaps I'm strange, but this is one of thing things that I consider pre-sale when working with a provider with which I'm unfamiliar. It's not a deal-breaker, but is something to which I pay attention. Note that this is most significant for Web content providers, for obvious reasons. Several providers tag internally, although some do not disclose their tags. Granularity and detail vary widely. (Compare C&W with GBLX, for example.) Eddy -- Brotsman & Dreger, Inc. - EverQuick Internet Division Bandwidth, consulting, e-commerce, hosting, and network building Phone: +1 (785) 865-5885 Lawrence and [inter]national Phone: +1 (316) 794-8922 Wichita ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 11:23:58 +0000 (GMT) From: A Trap <blacklist@brics.com> To: blacklist@brics.com Subject: Please ignore this portion of my mail signature. These last few lines are a trap for address-harvesting spambots. Do NOT send mail to <blacklist@brics.com>, or you are likely to be blocked.
Certainly do.. debugging and analysis yes, the communities also determine what we announce to who eg if its tagged as a peer route dont announce to other peers Our customers also like them as they can make decisions about our routes without the benefit of all the BGP info such as next hop exit point from our network Steve On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Thomas Kernen wrote:
This started off as me being curious as to why a UUNet engineer I was talking to told me he could not understand why a network would support a feature such as BGP communities for identifying the origin of a route/network entry point. I tried to explain to him the advantage of being able to quickly identify where a route originates from (geographically), type of interconnect, type of "peer" (in this case I use peer for any BGP peer, customer or transit). I explained that it could be usefull for debugging and gaining more background info (route analysis is one of my favorite tasks) and some of the major and minor networks do provide such a feature/service.
Still the engineer could not understand why and only saw this as a security issue, well I guess when you work for a network that does not provide any public looking glass or route server it's not really a surprise </rant>
This triggered a thought, do many people actually use BGP communities to pinpoint a route origination point/type, and if so for what purpose (debugging, analysis, other)
Thomas
PS: If UUNet do actually support this feature please tell me who I should contact.
You can find an analysis of the utilization of communities found in routing tables collected by RIPE RIS and RouteViews at http://www.infonet.fundp.ac.be/doc/reports/Infonet-TR-2002-02.pdf. In this analysis we show two things: (1) communities tend to be widely used and (2) communities are used for route tagging (for instance to remember where a route has been issued and traffic engineering purposes (for instance to influence how a peer will redistribute our routes). The results of the analysis are available from http://alpha.infonet.fundp.ac.be/anabgp By the way, we have presented our work during the last NANOG meeting in Toronto. The slides are available from http://www.nanog.org/mtg-0206/bruno.html Bruno. Thomas Kernen wrote:
This started off as me being curious as to why a UUNet engineer I was talking to told me he could not understand why a network would support a feature such as BGP communities for identifying the origin of a route/network entry point. I tried to explain to him the advantage of being able to quickly identify where a route originates from (geographically), type of interconnect, type of "peer" (in this case I use peer for any BGP peer, customer or transit). I explained that it could be usefull for debugging and gaining more background info (route analysis is one of my favorite tasks) and some of the major and minor networks do provide such a feature/service.
Still the engineer could not understand why and only saw this as a security issue, well I guess when you work for a network that does not provide any public looking glass or route server it's not really a surprise </rant>
This triggered a thought, do many people actually use BGP communities to pinpoint a route origination point/type, and if so for what purpose (debugging, analysis, other)
Thomas
PS: If UUNet do actually support this feature please tell me who I should contact.
Many providers document their communities on webpages: eg: http://info.us.bb.verio.net/routing.html#communities http://cw-rr.cw.net/community_receive.htm http://cw-rr.cw.net/community_announce.htm you probally just need to find the uunet specific webpage as it realtes to this. - jared On Tue, Jun 18, 2002 at 08:13:50PM -0400, Thomas Kernen wrote:
This started off as me being curious as to why a UUNet engineer I was talking to told me he could not understand why a network would support a feature such as BGP communities for identifying the origin of a route/network entry point. I tried to explain to him the advantage of being able to quickly identify where a route originates from (geographically), type of interconnect, type of "peer" (in this case I use peer for any BGP peer, customer or transit). I explained that it could be usefull for debugging and gaining more background info (route analysis is one of my favorite tasks) and some of the major and minor networks do provide such a feature/service.
Still the engineer could not understand why and only saw this as a security issue, well I guess when you work for a network that does not provide any public looking glass or route server it's not really a surprise </rant>
This triggered a thought, do many people actually use BGP communities to pinpoint a route origination point/type, and if so for what purpose (debugging, analysis, other)
Thomas
PS: If UUNet do actually support this feature please tell me who I should contact.
-- Jared Mauch | pgp key available via finger from jared@puck.nether.net clue++; | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/ My statements are only mine.
participants (5)
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Bruno Quoitin -
E.B. Dreger -
Jared Mauch -
Stephen J. Wilcox -
Thomas Kernen