Experience with the BGP-4 Protocol
draft-ietf-idr-bgp4-experience-protocol-05

Review by Suzanne Woolf, Gen-ART


Summary: This draft is ready for publication as Informational in
support of moving BGP4 to full Standard.


It's easy to regard this report as largely a formality-- it almost
goes without saying that BGP-4 has proven more than adequate as a
standard for running internet routing. However, it's an important
checkbox item for the standardization process, so....go forth.

As far as I can tell, the list of Normative references is complete,
but it's long and complex enough to bear another check IMHO.

Spell check. Also, copy-edit: for example, the phrase "in the begining
[sic] of Update message" appears on p. 13. I know the authors are
literate and this is overall a reasonably well-written document-- all
that's really needed is an insomniac with the digital equivalent of a
blue pen.

The references to protocol extensions since RFC 1773 and Draft
Standard are hard to find, but that just made it hard for me to be
sure they were included; once the doc is published, that's probably a
non-issue.

The term "NLRI" or "NRLI" is not defined in this document. It probably
should be, possibly with a reference. Also, one is wrong and should be
corrected, but without a reference it's hard to be sure which :)

I don't think the historical notes on Routing Registries are strictly
required, but they're interesting, and relevant to operational
usefulness of BGP-4. A comment explicitly tying the scalability and
viability of BGP-4 to the avaiability of such tools as RPSL and the
IRRs might clarify this discussion.