re-posted for broader audience: My apologies if this has been discussed recently... Is there a collective wisdom as to why the BGP RFC makes the statements that it does about the BGP next hop attribute? Specifically: (From RFC 1771): "A BGP speaker must never advertise an address of a peer to that peer as a NEXT_HOP, for a route that the speaker is originating. A BGP speaker must never install a route with itself as the next hop. When a BGP speaker advertises the route to a BGP speaker located in its own autonomous system, the advertising speaker shall not modify the NEXT_HOP attribute associated with the route. When a BGP speaker receives the route via an internal link, it may forward packets to the NEXT_HOP address if the address contained in the attribute is on a common subnet with the local and remote BGP speakers." At routers that have EBGP session injecting routes into its own AS on Cisco routers we set the next-hop-self attribute to eliminate synchronization issues, but I'm curious as to why the RFC made these requirements in the first place? Thank you for any brain cycles spent on this. _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com