On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 03:05:21PM +0200, Denis Walker wrote:
Although the proposal had received some support when discussed recently on the Database Working Group mailing list, there was some discussion during the RIPE 67 Routing Working Group session that the community field can be used to achieve the same result as these proposed "via" attributes.
IMHO, overloading the BGP community field is not the appropiate place for such inter-domain policy publication. Not only is the BGP community field only 32 bit (thus not allowing for targetting 32 bit ASNs with an action) - it will never provide a uniform interface for users as each AS interprets and treats communities in their own way.
However, some people have commented that the community field cannot be used for this purpose with 32-bit AS Numbers. As a result, the RIPE NCC was asked to bring the issue back to this mailing list for further discussion.
Exactly. Also, I feel that we should be careful in this thread not to venture into a zealotic discussion what the best approach is (BGP Communities versus RPSL), but rather discuss if RPSL-via is valid and workable, and if yes allow people to use it. Kind regards, Job