Three ways of filtering BGP, listed in my order of preference, with the most preferrable first: 1. Prefix lists that specify permitted blocks and prefix lengths. 2. AS path lists that specify permitted AS paths (or AS path suffixes.) 3. AS path lists that specify excluded AS paths (what you're trying to do.) The problem with specifying paths to exclude is that the neighbor still has too much leeway to mess things up. Let's say that your neighbor adds another carrier. Your filters won't kill those announcements, and you'll potentially wind up with 95k routes coming across the wire that hopefully will be filtered on your side. This looks like it's what you were trying to do: |router bgp 65000 | neighbor w.x.y.z remote-as n | neighbor w.x.y.z route-map XXX out |ip as-path access-list 20 deny _6347_ |ip as-path access-list 20 deny _1_ |ip as-path access-list 20 permit .* |route-map XXX permit 10 | match as-path 20 In the case of BGP, it's probably better practice to say what is permitted rather than what isn't, whenever feasible. To that end, if you wanted to stick with AS path filtering, you would only permit sane paths to advertise, such as ^$ and ^65001$: |ip as-path access-list 20 permit ^$ |ip as-path access-list 20 permit ^65001$ That still doesn't cover the case of the neighbor doing silly things like redistributing 0/0, spewing /30s at you, or /24s along with unnecessary child /25s. (Here's a hint: avoid "redistribute static" and "redistribute connected" wherever possible.) That's why it helps to have good prefix filtering at both ends. You can combine this with AS path filtering, or you may find that prefix filtering alone is all that you need, and additional AS path filtering on top of it is overkill. |router bgp 65000 | neighbor w.x.y.z remote-as n | neighbor w.x.y.z prefix-list XXX out |ip prefix-list XXX seq 5 permit a.b.c.d/p le 24 |ip prefix-list XXX seq 10 permit e.f.g.h/q le 24 |ip prefix-list XXX seq 15 permit i.j.k.l/r le 24 Mark Jon Stanley wrote:

I was assiting a customer the other day who was attempting to act as transit to us (we were filtering it thank goodness). Now my question is why the AS_PATH list that I gave him did not work. His AS is (let's say) 65000, and he has a transit AS 65001. He is multi-homed with AS1 and AS6347. Here is what I gave him:

ip as-path access-list 20 deny ^.*(_6347).*$ ip as-path access-list 20 deny ^.*(_1).*$ ip as-path access-list 20 permit .*

and I then applied it as a filter-list outbound on the neighbor. This worked great at filtering out the routes that he was originating. As for the routes that HIS transit customer was advertising, it didn't work at all - they weren't getting advertised. I thought that the access-list may have been defective, so i changed the second line to ^.*(_1_).*$ but that didn't help either. What I wound up doing as a bandaid was putting in

ip as-path access-list 20 permit ^65001$

between the second deny and the permit .*. Now I may not understand Cisco regular expressions, but the first access-list the desired effect was to deny everything with AS1 or AS6347 in the as-path and permit everything else. Why didn't this work as intended?

AS numbers changed to protect the innocent :).