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

Yes, absolutely!

I believe it is helpful because many people are looking for a solution like Large Communities provides (with their favorite search engine). This sentence is a hat tip to a 10+ year problem.

Large Communities addresses a very urgent problem from the operator community, specifically because it can be used by ASNs which fit only in four-octet values.

We are scraping the bottom of the barrel, IANA has run out of two-octet ASNs. Also at the RIR level, the end is also in sight: There are only a few thousand left. We cannot sustain the growth of the internet without a tool like Large Communities. Large Communities specifically addresses an issue which prevents four-octets from being used in a similar way to how RFC1997 is used.

Btw, I am not clear on how the topic at hand relates to the actual content of the DISCUSS. Can you update the discuss? Or how should I view the feedback?

Kind regards,

Job

On 4 Jan 2017, 20:43 +0200, Benoit Claise <bclaise@cisco.com>, wrote:
> Hi Job,
>
> So basically, you're telling me: "The attribute is suitable for use with
> ASNs.", right?
> Is this what needs to be in the abstract?
>
> Regards, B.
> > 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
> > .
> >
>
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