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Re: [Idr] Last Call: <draft-ietf-idr-ix-bgp-route-server-10.txt> (Internet Exchange BGP Route Server) to Proposed Standard

2016-06-01 05:51:25
On 2016-05-31 17:40, Nick Hilliard wrote:
Marco Marzetti wrote:
Beside i agree on the most part of this draft i would like to underline
how bullet 2.2.2 breaks the the nature of BGP itself.

The exact part i am referring to is:
"""
 As a route server does not participate in the process of forwarding
data between client routers, and because modification of the AS_PATH attribute could affect route server client BGP Decision Process, the
   route server SHOULD NOT prepend its own AS number to the AS_PATH
   segment nor modify the AS_PATH segment in any other way.
"""

I firmly think that it really has to state "MUST NOT" instead of "SHOULD
NOT".

From a route-server client point of view that breaks the natural BGP
best selection process and forces you to purely rely on LOCAL_PREFERENCE which in turns breaks your traffic engineering because it forces you to prefer/not-prefer the prefixes learned over the route server in place of
those learned, for instance, over a private session or another IXP.

It doesn't "break" the decision process mechanism.  Localpref might be
ugly, but using it doesn't violate the bgp protocol.

This statement needs to be "MUST NOT".  Technically you can run a route
server even if you insert the intermediate ASN into the path.  The only
absolute "MUST" is that you mustn't change the next-hop; otherwise you
end up with a router instead of a route server.

RFC2119 is a pain because there is no way of differentiating between
"SHOULD NOT", meaning "on balance it would be a better idea not to do X"
and "SHOULD NOT", meaning "if you even _think_ about doing X, you need
your head examined and the only reason we specified SHOULD NOT instead
of MUST NOT in this situation because of some technicality that
prevented us from doing so".  The text in 2.2.2 veers slightly in the
direction of the latter interpretation.

Nick

Nick,

I agree with you that you can run a route server and insert your ASn in the path, but i think that is a lack of common sense which brings only contraries and no benefits.

About RFC2119: It says that "SHOULD NOT" implies a valid reason to accept a behavior, but i can't find any.

Regards

--
Marco