



IDR                                                          J. Snijders
Internet-Draft                                                       NTT
Intended status: Standards Track                       December 29, 2016
Expires: July 2, 2017


Deprecation of BGP Path Attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243
                 draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129-02

Abstract

   This document requests IANA to mark BGP path attribute values 30, 31,
   129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated".

Status of This Memo

   This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
   provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

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   This Internet-Draft will expire on July 2, 2017.

Copyright Notice

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   document authors.  All rights reserved.

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   described in the Simplified BSD License.






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Table of Contents

   1.  Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   2.  IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   3.  Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   2
   4.  Informative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   Appendix A.  Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3
   Author's Address  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   3

1.  Introduction

   It has been discovered that certain BGP Path Attribute values have
   been used in BGP implementations which have been deployed in the wild
   while not being assigned by the IANA for such usage.  Unregistered
   usage of BGP Path Attribute values can lead to deployment problems
   for new technologies.

   The use of these unregistered values was noticed when BGP Large
   Communities attribute [I-D.ietf-idr-large-community] was initially
   assigned value 30 by IANA.  It was subsequently discovered that a
   widely-deployed BGP-4 [RFC4271] implementation had released code
   which used path attribute 30 and which applied a "Treat-as-withdraw"
   [RFC7606] strategy to routes containing a valid Large Community
   attribute, since it was expecting a different data structure.
   Because these routes were dropped, early adopters of Large
   Communities were unreachable from parts of the Internet.  As a
   workaround, a new Early IANA Allocation was requested.

   The squatting of values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242 and 243 has been
   confirmed by the involved vendors or through source code review.

2.  IANA Considerations

   Per this document, IANA is requested to mark values 30, 31, 129, 241,
   242, and 243 as "deprecated" in the "BGP Path Attributes" registry
   under the "Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Parameters" group.  The
   marking "deprecated" meaning "use is not recommended"
   ([I-D.leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis]).

3.  Security Considerations

   There are no meaningful security consequences arising from this
   registry update.








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4.  Informative References

   [I-D.ietf-idr-large-community]
              Heitz, J., Snijders, J., Patel, K., Bagdonas, I., and N.
              Hilliard, "BGP Large Communities", draft-ietf-idr-large-
              community-11 (work in progress), December 2016.

   [I-D.leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis]
              Cotton, M., Leiba, B., and T. Narten, "Guidelines for
              Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", draft-
              leiba-cotton-iana-5226bis-18 (work in progress), September
              2016.

   [RFC4271]  Rekhter, Y., Ed., Li, T., Ed., and S. Hares, Ed., "A
              Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4)", RFC 4271,
              DOI 10.17487/RFC4271, January 2006,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4271>.

   [RFC7606]  Chen, E., Ed., Scudder, J., Ed., Mohapatra, P., and K.
              Patel, "Revised Error Handling for BGP UPDATE Messages",
              RFC 7606, DOI 10.17487/RFC7606, August 2015,
              <http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7606>.

Appendix A.  Acknowledgements

   The author would like to gratefully acknowledge Marlien Vijfhuizen
   who helped discover the squatting of value 30, and Nick Hilliard for
   editorial feedback.

Author's Address

   Job Snijders
   NTT Communications
   Theodorus Majofskistraat 100
   Amsterdam  1065 SZ
   NL

   Email: job@ntt.net













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