Re: [Idr] WG adoption for draft-haas-flowspec-capability-bits - 3/30 to 4/13

[Jeffrey Haas <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Apr 09, 2021 at 12:36:01AM +0000, Jakob Heitz (jheitz) wrote:
> This makes sense.
> 
> You should probably modify or delete section 4.

Certainly one of these.  The motivation of the document is to help with
incremental deployment primarily through noting what can be parsed.  The
procedure is "I don't know this component, don't send it to me".  I think
that aspect is clear.

Even if the section is completely deleted, it doesn't remove the implication
that a router may decide to limit what it advertises support for at the
discretion of the operator.  This is no different than policy.

> A BGP speaker has basically 2 jobs. 1. to propagate a received route to other neighbors and 2. to act on the route (install the filter). A BGP capability advertised by a router is only known to the neighbor of that router, not necessarily to the originator of a route. Therefore, BGP capabilities are an insufficient means to discover the capabilities of all routers in a network. All that BGP capabilities can really do is to prevent a neighbor from tearing down a BGP session when you send it a route it does not recognize (by enabling you to not send the unrecognized route in the first place). To find out how many routers in your network will install a given flowspec requires more capable network management techniques.

I agree the capability isn't intended to address the network wide problem.
That work is deferred to a later time.

-- Jeff