Re: [Idr] Proposed IANA procedures for BGP Well-known communities

[David Ward <[e-mail]>]

Tony -

I don't think that it is entirely procedural given the semantics of  
the well-known set. Rephrasing ...

point 1: The only well-known communities are those specified in 1997  
as they are old enough and widely deployed to the point that they are  
considered part of the foundation of BGP communities support.

point 2: calling any extensions to that subset (e.g. "ACCEPT_OWN")   
as well-known isn't appropriate as there is no guarantee of ubiquity  
of support

Issue: we know that we want to be able to add to the reserved set of  
values

If we care about the deployment ubiquity  of those titled "well- 
known" vs "allocated." Do we need a mechanism to signal that  
standardized communities are supported? Config mechanisms? Options  
include:

- dyn cap for each new value = painful signaling for each
- notion of "sets of allocated comms" that can have dyn cap for each  
set (insert issue of defn of the set) = move the problem to tomorrow
- required installation of configuration on devices for "identifying"  
comms until a version of SW can be loaded that supports the allocated  
comms
- do nothing and apply hope that an operator knows what they are doing

I prefer not to get caught in a chicken-egg situation of the  
semantics of "well-known" vs "allocated." There is clear precedence  
of being able to extend allocations of bits, flags, opaque_ids, etc  
and have incremental deployment.

-DWard

On Jul 17, 2008, at 3:09 PM, Tony Li wrote:

>
> Dave,
>
> My concern is related and is perhaps entirely procedural.  If a  
> "well-known"
> community is supposed to have universal support and given that we  
> already
> have implementations in the field, how can any new community (or  
> for that
> matter, path attribute) truly become "well-known"?  We have to  
> assume that
> there will always be at least one box in the field that will not  
> support it.
>
> Further, if it's not practical to add to the set of "well-known"
> communities, is there really a reason to have an IANA registry for  
> that
> subset?
>
> Regards,
> Tony
>
>
> |>> Well-known Communities
> |>>
> |>>    The following communities have global significance and their
> |>>    operations shall be implemented in any community-attribute-
> |>> aware  BGP
> |>>    speaker.
>
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