[Idr] Capability Advertisement in draft-ietf-idr-bgp-extended-messages

[Alvaro Retana <[e-mail]>]

On July 31, 2019 at 1:31:11 PM, Susan Hares ([e-mail]) wrote:

Dear WG:

As I hope all of you know, the Extended Messages draft is being processed
by the IESG.

Enke had brought up [1] some confusion in the text in rfc5492 related to
the need, or not, for both BGP speakers to advertise a Capability before it
can be used.  I discussed this point with Enke and John Scudder last week
in Montreal — we looked at the text in the RFC and how recent Capabilities
had been specified — and concluded that the intent of the RFC was to
require at least one speaker to advertise the Capability…but that it should
be the responsibility of any document defining a Capability to explicitly
specify any changes.

IOW, in some cases it may be enough for one of the peers to advertise a
Capability, but in other cases it may be required for both to do so.
 [Enke/John will work on an Update to rfc5492 to clarify.]

Related to Extended Messages, here’s is what Enke proposed on the list [2]:

   As long as Speaker A is able and willing to receive large messages (by
advertising
   the capability), its neighbor would be allowed to send such messages to
Speaker A.
   Such behavior does not depend on whether Speaker A is able / willing /
need to
   send any large messages to its neighbors.


We have modified the text in draft-ietf-idr-bgp-extended-messages to
reflect Enke’s proposal (from -35):

   A BGP speaker that is capable of receiving BGP Extended Messages
   SHOULD advertise the BGP Extended Message Capability to its peers
   using BGP Capabilities Advertisement [RFC5492].  A BGP speaker MAY
   send Extended Messages to a peer only if the Extended Message
   Capability was received from that peer.

   An implementation that advertises the BGP Extended Message capability
   MUST be capable of receiving a message with a Length up to and
   including 65,535 octets.


During the IESG Evaluation, Sue pointed out that we removed the piece of
text below:

Just to let you know that the text below:



“A peer which does not advertise this capability MUST NOT send BGP


   Extended Messages, and BGP Extended Messages MUST NOT be sent to it.”



was added due to comments on the IDR WG list from reviewers and operators.

Given that Extended Messages is a very important extension to BGP, and even
though I didn’t see objections in the thread mentioned above, I want to
confirm one more time that the current text is ok with the WG.  The
effective change is really related to the piece that says "A peer which
does not advertise this capability MUST NOT send BGP Extended Messages”,
which would require that both peers advertise the Capability before it can
be used.

Please reply with any comments by end-of-day on August 8, 2019.  Please
explain any arguments against what is currently specified in -35.   The
document is scheduled to be considered by the IESG on Aug/8, but I will
hold approving publication until there is consensus on this thread.

Thanks!

Alvaro.

[1] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/idr/vaBLOKHQZlRCiJOMTT8VjJrWp7c
[2] https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/idr/K5rA5rVci6VhMv5-UqXXaoRlvXo