Re: [Idr] Mirja Kühlewind's No Objection on draft-ietf-idr-large-community-11: (with COMMENT)

[Job Snijders <[e-mail]>]

Dear Mirja,

On Mon, Jan 02, 2017 at 05:14:31AM -0800, Mirja Kuehlewind wrote:
> Mirja Kühlewind has entered the following ballot position for
> draft-ietf-idr-large-community-11: No Objection

Thank you for your review.

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> COMMENT:
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> One question: Since the Global Administrator field could also be not an
> ASN, would it be useful to say something about what should be done if an
> unknow value is received (ignore, remove, log an error...)?

Section 5 states:

    """
    The BGP Large Communities Global Administrator field may contain
    any value, and a BGP Large Communities attribute MUST NOT be
    considered malformed if the Global Administrator field contains an
    unallocated, unassigned or reserved ASN.
    """

Further more, based on our experience with the current implementations
[1], [2] there was no perceived ambiguity amongst the implementers what
to do with non ASN values in the Global Administator field. The global
administrator field contains just an unsigned 32-bit integer.

The consensus on the mailing list was to treat the non ASN values
exactly the same as normal values. As such it would not be correct to
ignore, remove, or log an error.

In other words, the ability to put a non-ASN values in the Global
Administrator field is by design.

Kind regards,

Job

[1]: http://largebgpcommunities.net/implementations/
[2]: https://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/idr/trac/wiki/draft-ietf-idr-large-community%20implementations