Re: [Idr] Benoit Claise's Discuss on draft-ietf-idr-large-community-11: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Job Snijders <[e-mail]>]

Hi Benoit,

On Wed, Jan 04, 2017 at 04:39:25PM +0100, Benoit Claise wrote:
> > Global Administrator field is a 4 octet integer that is used to carry AS
> > number but it is not mandatory to interpret it as an AS number only
> > (while a typical use case is for carrying AS number) - two peers can
> > agree on any value that has meaning between those peers. Representation
> > on the wire is in network byte order, and 2 byte AS number will get
> > naturally padded with two zero bytes in front. Virtually all deployments
> > today are AS4 capable and use AS4 encoding even for AS number values
> > that fit into 16 bit value range therefore AS number is a 4 octet entity
> > already.
>
> Then this sentence in the abstract "The attribute is suitable for use
> with four-octet ASNs." is misleading, right? At least to me. The
> attribute is suitable for four-octets ASNs and two-octets ASNs encoded
> in four-octets. This would be more in line with "This field SHOULD be
> an Autonomous System Number (ASN)" later on.

I am under the impression that nowadays the IETF community considers all
ASNs to be four-octet ASNs, however, some of those ASNs can be encoded
as a two octet value. The Large Communities specification is suitable
for usage in Autonomous Systems from all walks of life, where as rfc1997
communities are unsuitable for all ASNs, specifically those ASNs which
cannot be encoded as two-octet values.

Kind regards,

Job