Internet Engineering Task Force                     Olivier Bonaventure
INTERNET DRAFT                                                      UCL
                                                     Stefaan De Cnodder
                                                                Alcatel
                                                           Jeffrey Haas
                                                                NextHop
                                                          Bruno Quoitin
                                                                  FUNDP
                                                             Russ White
                                                                  Cisco
                                                         February, 2003
                                                  Expires October, 2003

              Controlling the redistribution of BGP routes
            <draft-ietf-ptomaine-bgp-redistribution-02.txt>

Status of this Memo

   This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with
   all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026.

   Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
   Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups.  Note that
   other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-
   Drafts.

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
   material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

   The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt

   The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at
   http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html.


Abstract


   This document proposes the redistribution extended community.  This
   new extended community allows a router to influence how a specific
   route should be redistributed towards a specified set of eBGP
   speakers. Several types of redistribution communities are proposed.
   The first type may be used to indicate that a specific route should
   not be announced over a specified set of eBGP sessions. The second
   type may be used to indicate that the attached route should only be



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   announced with the NO_EXPORT community over the specified set of eBGP
   sessions and the third type may be used to indicate that the attached
   route should be prepended n times when announced over a specified set
   of eBGP sessions.

1   Introduction


   In today's commercial Internet, many ISPs need to have some control
   on their inter-domain traffic. In the outgoing direction, this
   control can be obtained by configuring the BGP routers of the ISP to
   favor some routes over others by using the LOCAL-PREF attribute.
   However, due to the asymetry of Internet traffic, most ISPs also need
   to control their incoming traffic.

             +---------------+
             |               |
             |     AS22      |
             |               |
             +---------------+
                    ||
             +---------------+               +---------------+
             | 13.0.0.0/8    |               |      AS21     |
             | 12.0.0.0/8    |===============|               |
             |     AS20      |               +---------------+
             +---------------+
                    ||
             +---------------+
             |               |
             |    AS10       |
             |               |
             +---------------+
                  Figure 1: Simple inter-domain topology


   In the incoming direction, the only way to influence the traffic flow
   is to control the redistribution of its routes. Several methods exist
   and are used in practice [Halabi97,COM-SUR]. In this case, the ISP
   needs to influence the redistribution and the selection of its own
   routes by remote ISPs. Since the default configuration of many BGP
   routers  is to select the route with the smallest AS path length, a
   common technique is to artificially increase the length of the AS
   path for some  announced routes. For example, in figure 1, if AS20
   wanted to indicate that it prefers to receive its traffic towards
   subnet 13.0.0.0/8 through its link with AS22, then it would announce
   this prefix as usual on this link to AS22 and announce a prefix with
   the AS20:AS20:AS20:AS20 path to AS21 and AS10. If AS10 and AS21 use
   the AS path length to select the best BGP route, they will prefer the



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   shorter route received by AS22. This requires manual configuration of
   the BGP routers, but path prepending is very frequently used today on
   the Internet [Huston01]. In some cases, the configuration burden can
   be reduced by using the BGP communities attribute.

   Recently, several large ISPs have gone one step further by defining
   BGP communities that allow their customers  to influence the
   redistribution of their routes. For example, in figure 1, AS20 could
   configure its BGP routers to always prepend AS20 four times when they
   announce via eBGP a route received  from one of AS20's customers with
   a special community attribute.  For this, AS20 needs to publish the
   specific BGP communities that it supports and its customers need to
   configure their router appropriately. If AS20 needs to define a new
   BGP community or change an existing one, it must inform all its
   customers may need to update the configuration of their routers.

   A more detailed survey of the utilization of the BGP community
   attribute by ISPs may be found in [COM-SUR].  This survey reveals the
   following:
   -  Many different ASes define their own BGP community values
      to allow their customers/peers to indicate that a
      particular route should not be propagated towards a specific AS,
      towards the routers attached to a specific IX, or towards ASes
      within a given geographical area (e.g. a European AS could want
      to prohibit a route from being announced to US peers).
   -  Many ASes define their own BGP community values
      to allow their peers or customers to indicate that an
      announced route should be prepended when announced towards a
      specific AS, IX or set of ASes.
   -  Several ASes define their own BGP community attribute to indicate
      that a given route should only be redistributed towards a
      specified AS.

   Furthermore, this survey also reveals that some ASes have difficulty
   providing all these facilities while still relying on their assigned
   set of BGP community values. For example, some ASes have chosen to
   reuse several BGP community values in the private AS space (i.e.
   community values 64512:00 - 65534:65535) to be able to define
   structured communities that allow their customers to influence the
   redistribution of their routes.  Some of these community values
   appear in BGP tables on the global Internet.

   Although the survey shows that these BGP communities are widely used
   today to provide such facilities, this is far from the best solution.
   Requiring each AS to select its own values for the BGP communities
   and to document these values in the routing registries is not very
   efficient because it forces the BGP routers to be configured manually
   based on information found in these registries, peering agreements,



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   or elsewhere.

   In this document, we define a new type of BGP extended community.  By
   using a set BGP extended communities with a precise syntax, we
   support most of the current utilizations of the BGP community without
   relying unnecessarily on manual configuration of the BGP routers. We
   believe that reducing the manual configuration of these routers would
   be very useful for the stability and the performance of the global
   Internet.


2   Controlled redistribution of BGP routes


   This document defines a method to allow a BGP speaker to influence
   how its peers will redistribute its own routes. For this, the BGP
   speaker may define for each announced route a redistribution policy
   that controls how this route will be redistributed. This is done by
   defining a set of allowed or requested operations and a list of BGP
   speakers. The list of BGP speakers can be specified by listing either
   the BGP speakers that are covered by the redistribution policy or
   those that are not covered by this policy. The current version of
   this document supports the following operations:


     - the attached route should not be announced to the specified BGP
     speakers


     - the attached route should only be announced to the specified BGP
     speakers


     - the attached route should be announced with the NO_EXPORT
     attribute to the specified BGP speakers


     - the attached route should be prepended n times when announced to
     to the specified BGP speakers

     The redistribution policies are encoded in a special type of
     extended community called the redistribution community.  If a
     redistribution policy applies to several of BGP speakers, then it
     will be encoded in several redistribution communities.

 2.1  The redistribution community

     The extended communities attribute is defined in [EXT-COM]. This



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     attribute allows a BGP router to attach a set of extended communi­
     ties to an UPDATE message. Each extended community value is encoded
     as an eight octets quantity with a one or two octets type field and
     a six or seven octet value field.  Several types of extended commu­
     nity values are defined in [EXT-COM].  This document proposes a new
     well-known extended community:  the redistribution community.

     The redistribution community is composed of a one octet type field
     (regular type). It is encoded as defined in [EXT-COM]. The high-
     order bit is cleared (type assigned by IANA). Since the redistribu­
     tion community is only used for signalling purposes between two
     neighbor AS's, bit6 is set meaning that the extended community is
     non-transitive across ASes.  This is important to ensure that com­
     munities used to affect the redistribution of routes by a given AS
     are not unnecessarily distributed over the entire Internet as it is
     often the case today [COM-SUR].  The remaining 6 lower-order bits
     are to be defined by IANA (TBDTBD notation in figure 1).

      1 octet  1 octet       6 octets
     +--------+--------+---------------------+
     |01TBDTBD| Action | BGP_Speakers_Filter |
     +--------+--------+---------------------+
     Figure 1: Encoding of the redistribution community


     The remaining 7 octets of the redistribution community indicate how
     a router will advertise the received route to its peers. This
     requires two pieces of information:  a filter to select a subset of
     BGP speakers and an action that indicates how the attached route
     should be redistributed to the selected BGP speakers. The high-
     order octet indicates the action to be taken and the 6 remaining
     octets define the filter.


     The Action octet is encoded as follow:


     - The high and the second order bits (Bit7 and Bit6) are reserved
     and set to zero in this document

     - Bit5-3 are the Action type

     - Bit2-0 are the Action parameters

  Action types

     This document defines three types of actions (values 000b - 010b).
     Values 011b-111b are reserved for future use and are to be assigned



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     by IANA by IETF consensus as defined in [RFC2434].


     - 000b Prepend. This action means that the AS number of the
     announcing router should be prepended when announcing the attached
     route to the BGP speakers covered by the redistribution policy. The
     action parameter indicates how many times the AS number should be
     prepended. Using an action parameter of 000 with this type,
     although legal, will not cause any additional prepending of the
     route's AS PATH.


     - 001b No_Export. This action means that the NO_EXPORT community
     should be inserted when announcing the attached route to the BGP
     speakers covered by the redistribution policy. This action type
     does not require a parameter. The action parameter should be set to
     zero by the sender and ignored by the receiver.


     - 010b Do not announce. This action means that the route should not
     be announced to the BGP speakers covered by the redistribution pol­
     icy. This action type does not require a parameter. The action
     parameter should be set to zero by the sender and ignored by the
     receiver.


  The BGP Speakers Filter

     The BGP_Speakers_Filter field is used to specify the BGP speakers
     that will be affected by the specified action. It is composed of a
     one octet type field and a five octets value field.

     +--------+--------------------------------------+
     | Type   | BGP_Speakers_Filter Value (5 octets) |
     +--------+--------------------------------------+
     Figure 2: Encoding of the BGP_Speakers_Filter field

     The BGP_Speakers_Filter field is used to specify the BGP speakers
     that will be affected by the specified action. There are two meth­
     ods to specify the affected BGP speakers. The first method is to
     explicitly list all those speakers inside the BGP_Speakers_Filters
     field of the redistribution communities. In this case, the high
     order bit of the type field of the BGP_Speakers_Filter field is set
     to 1.  The second method is to explicitly list only the BGP speak­
     ers that will not be affected by the specified action. In this
     case, the high order bit of the BGP_Speakers_Filter type field
     shall be set to 0. The 7 low order bits of the BGP_Speakers_Filter
     type field are used to indicate the type of BGP speakers included



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     in the five low order octets of the BGP_Speakers_Filter field.
     This document defines four types of BGP_Speakers_Filters (values
     0x01-0x04). Value 0x00 is reserved and values 0x05-0x3f are
     reserved for future use and are to be assigned by IANA by IETF con­
     sensus as defined in [RFC2434]. Values 0x40-0x7f are vendor spe­
     cific and are assigned by IANA on a first come, first serve basis.

  BGP_Speakers_Filter types


     - The BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains a two octet AS number
     (type 0x01)

     - The BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains two two octet AS numbers
     type 0x02)

     - The BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains a CIDR prefix/length pair
     (type 0x03)

     - The BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains a four octets AS number
     (type 0x04)

     The BGP_Speakers_Filter value shall be encoded as follows. If this
     field contains a two octet AS number, the AS number shall be placed
     in the two low order octets. The three high order octets shall be
     set to zero upon transmission and ignored upon reception.

     +---------------------------+
     |  Must be Zero (3 octets)  |
     +---------------------------+
     |   AS number (2 octets)    |
     +---------------------------+
     Figure 3: BGP speakers filter containing a single two octet AS number

     If the BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains two two octet AS numbers,
     one of the AS numbers should be placed in the two low order octets.
     The other AS number should be placed in the next two higher order
     octets and the last octet shall be set to zero upon transmission
     and ignored upon reception.

     +---------------------------+
     |  Must be Zero (1 octet)   |
     +---------------------------+
     |   AS number A (2 octets)  |
     +---------------------------+
     |   AS number B (2 octets)  |
     +---------------------------+
     Figure 4: BGP speakers filter containing two distinct two octet AS number



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     If the  BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains a four octet AS number,
     the AS number shall be placed in the four low order octets. The
     high order octet shall be set to zero upon transmission and ignored
     upon reception.

     +---------------------------+
     |  Must be Zero (1 octet)   |
     +---------------------------+
     |   AS number (4 octets)    |
     +---------------------------+
     Figure 5: BGP speakers filter containing a single four octets AS number


     If the BGP_Speakers_Filter value contains a CIDR prefix/length
     pair, it should be encoded as shown below:


     +---------------------------+
     |   Length (1 octet)        |
     +---------------------------+
     |   Prefix (4 octets)       |
     +---------------------------+
     Figure 6: BGP speakers filter containing a CIDR prefix/length pair

     The Length field indicates the length in bits of the IP address
     prefix. A length of zero indicates a prefix that matches all IP
     addresses. The Prefix field contains IP address prefixes followed
     by enough trailing bits with a value of zero to make the end of the
     field fall on a four octets boundary.

 2.2 Utilization of the redistribution communities


     A router may, depending on its policy, add one or several redistri­
     bution communities to a route originated by itself or received from
     another BGP speaker over an iBGP or an eBGP session. In practice,
     it can be expected that the redistribution communities will often
     be attached by the originator of the route will as this is an
     attempt of the route originator to do some form of inter-domain
     traffic engineering. In practice, it can also be expected that most
     utilizations of the redistribution communities will only require to
     attach a small number of those communities to a given route.

     When a router attaches one or several redistribution communities to
     a route, it must ensure that two of the included redistribution
     communities do not conflict. This is necessary to ensure that the
     redistribution communities will be processed in a deterministic
     manner by the remote BGP peer.  When several redistribution



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     communities contain the same action type and parameter, then all
     the BGP_Speakers_filters of those communities must have the same
     high order bit in the BGP_Speakers_Filter type.  A BGP router that
     receives a route containing invalid redistribution communities for
     a given action type and parameter should ignore all the redistribu­
     tion communities concerning this action type and parameter. This
     ignore action must be logged.


 2.3 Operations

     This document defines the procedures to support the redistribution
     communities that are non-transitive extended communities of type
     01TBDTBD. An implementation that understands the redistribution
     communities should discard and ignore upon receipt the extended
     communities of the form 00TBDTBD (i.e. same type as a redistribu­
     tion community but transitive).

     The redistribution communities defined in this document only affect
     the redistribution of the associated route over eBGP sessions. The
     redistribution communities do not affect the redistribution of
     routes over iBGP sessions or between the sub-ASes of a confedera­
     tion.

     When a router receives a route with redistribution communities, it
     should apply the operations specified by these communities when
     redistributing the route over eBGP sessions. Since the redistribu­
     tion communities defined by this document are non-transitive, a
     router will remove the received redistribution communities when
     redistributing those routes over eBGP sessions. Of course, nothing
     prevents this router from adding its own redistribution communities
     to this route before redistributing it.

     A router should apply the policies defined by the redistribution
     communities to the routes that is has selected for advertisement
     from its Adj-Rib-Out based on its own policy. A route that contains
     redistribution communities should be processed as follows:

     First, the BGP speaker should build for each action type and param­
     eter contained in the redistribution communities attached to the
     route a list of the target BGP speakers contained in the BGP_Speak­
     ers_filters for this action type.  In the remainder of this sec­
     tion, we will use the wordings "an eBGP session is affected by
     action type x" to indicate that either of the following is true
     when the BGP_Speakers_Filters contain AS numbers:






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     - the AS number of the remote BGP peer appears inside one of the
     BGP_Speakers_Filter of the redistribution communities with action x
     and the high order bit of the BGP_Speakers_Filter type is set to
     one


     - the AS number of the remote BGP peer does not appear inside any
     of the BGP_Speakers_Filter of the redistribution communities with
     action x and the high order bit of the BGP_Speakers_Filter type is
     set to zero

     When the BGP_Speakers_Filter contains a CIDR prefix/length, we will
     use the wordings "an eBGP session is affected by action type x" to
     indicate that either of the following is true:


     - the IP address of at least one of the endpoints of the eBGP ses­
     sion belongs to the CIDR prefix specified inside one of the
     BGP_Speakers_Filter of the redistribution communities with action x
     and the high order bit of the BGP_Speakers_Filter type is set to
     one


     - the IP addresses of the local and the remote endpoints of the
     eBGP session do not belong to the CIDR prefix specified inside one
     of the BGP_Speakers_Filter of the redistribution communities with
     action x and the high order bit of the BGP_Speakers_Filter type is
     set to zero

     Then, when a route is about to be redistributed over an eBGP ses­
     sion, the router first checks if this session is affected by action
     type "Do not announce". If this is the case, the route is not
     announced over this eBGP session. Otherwise, the router checks the
     other action types as follows.


     - If the eBGP session is affected by action type "No export" then
     the well-known community NO_EXPORT is attached to the route.


     - If the eBGP session is affected by one or more actions of type
     "Prepend", then the AS-Path of the route shall be prepended n times
     (with the AS number of the router redistributing the route) where n
     is the smallest parameter of the matched "Prepend" actions.

     Otherwise the route is announced over the eBGP session.

2.4 Filtering and precedence



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     In order to allow operators to control the implementation of their
     policies, a BGP implementation that supports the redistribution
     communities should allow the operator to determine, on a per ses­
     sion basis whether redistribution communities are permitted or
     denied on this session. For example, an AS could elect to receive
     redistribution communities from its customers, but not on a shared-
     cost peering session.  A BGP implementation may provide additional
     details in the filtering of the redistribution communities, but
     this is implementation dependent and goes beyond this specifica­
     tion.

     A BGP implementation that supports both the normal (extended) com­
     munities and the redistribution communities should allow the opera­
     tor to adjust the order in which these types of communities are
     processed. The default precedence should be to first process the
     redistribution communities before processing the other manually
     defined (extended) communities.

3   IANA considerations


     This document requests the attribution of a new BGP extended commu­
     nities type [EXT-COM] field from IANA.

     The redistribution community contains two fields that are to be
     maintained by IANA. The first field is the Action type that is part
     of the Action octet defined in section 2.1 shall be maintained by
     IANA. This document defines the utilization of action types 000b -
     010b ; action types 011b - 111b are reserved for future use and are
     to be assigned by IANA by IETF consensus as defined in [RFC2434].
     The second field are the seven low order bits of the Type octet of
     the BGP_Speakers_Filter defined in section 2.1. This document
     defines four types of BGP_Speakers_Filters (values 0x01-0x04).
     Value 0x00 is reserved and values 0x05-0x3f are reserved for future
     use and are to be assigned by IANA by IETF consensus as defined in
     [RFC2434].  Values 0x40-0x7f are vendor specific and are assigned
     by IANA on a first come, first serve basis.


4   Security considerations

     This extension to BGP does not change the underlying security
     issues of the extended community attribute.


5   Conclusion

     This document has proposed a new type of extended communities



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     called the redistribution communities. These redistribution commu­
     nities can be used by a BGP router to influence the redistribution
     of some of its routes by its peers.  Three types of redistribution
     communities have been proposed.  The first type may be used to
     indicate that a specific route should not be announced over the
     specified set  of eBGP sessions.  The second type may be used to
     indicate that the attached route should only be announced with the
     NO_EXPORT community over the specified set of eBGP sessions and the
     third type may be used to indicate that the attached route should
     be prepended n times when announced over the specified set of eBGP
     sessions.


Acknowledgements

     This work was partially funded by the European Commission, within
     the  ATRIUM IST project. We would like to thank Bart Peirens,
     Alvaro Retana and Andrew Partan for their comments.



References

     [Halabi97]  B. Halabi. Internet Routing Architectures. Cisco Press,
     1997.

     [Huston01]  G. Huston. AS1221 BGP table statistics. available from
     http://www.telstra.net/ops/bgp/, 2001.

     [COM-SUR] B. Quoitin, O. Bonaventure, A survey of the utilization
     of the BGP community attribute, Internet draft, draft-quoitin-bgp-
     comm-survey-00.txt, work in progress, February 2002

     [Quoitin02] B. Quoitin, An implementation of the BGP redistribution
     communities in zebra, Technical report Infonet-TR-2002-03, February
     2002, http://www.infonet.fundp.ac.be/doc/tr/Infonet-TR-2002-03.html

     [EXT-COM]  S. Sangli, D. Tappan, and Y. Rekhter. BGP extended com­
     munities attribute. Internet draft, draft-ietf-idr-bgp-ext-communi­
     ties-05.txt, work in progress, May 2002.

     [RFC2434] T. Narten, H. Alvestrand, Guidelines for Writing an IANA
     Considerations Section in RFCs, RFC2434, October 1998








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Authors' Addresses

   Olivier Bonaventure,
   Dept. Computing Science and Engineering
   Universite catholique de Louvain (UCL)
   Place Sainte-Barbe, 2, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)
   Email: Olivier.Bonaventure@info.fundp.ac.be
   URL  : http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/OBO

   Bruno Quoitin
   Infonet group (FUNDP)
   Rue Grandgagnage 21
   B-5000 Namur
   Email: Bruno.Quoitin@info.fundp.ac.be
   URL  : http://www.infonet.fundp.ac.be

   Stefaan De Cnodder
   Alcatel
   Francis Wellesplein 1
   B-2018 Antwerp, Belgium
   Email: stefaan.de_cnodder@alcatel.be


   Jeffrey Haas
   NextHop Technologies
   Email: jhaas@nexthop.com

   Russ White
   Cisco Systems
   Email: ruwhite@cisco.com

Full Copyright Statement

      Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2002).  All Rights Reserved.

      This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to
      others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it
      or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published
      and distributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any
      kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
      included on all such copies and derivative works.  However, this doc-
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      Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of develop-
      ing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights
      defined in the Internet Standards process must be followed, or as
      required to translate it into languages other than English.




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      The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be
      revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns.

      This document and the information contained herein is provided on an
      "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING
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Appendix 1 Simple example

   The redistribution communities defined in this document can be
   used in two different ways. A first possible solution would be
   to rely on the existing support for the extended communities in
   BGP implementations and to manually configure the redistribution
   communities defined in this document. This solution could be
   used today by ISPs to support the redistribution communities (or a subset
   of those communities) defined
   in this document instead on defining special community values in
   their community space and advertising them in the routing registries.

   To illustrate a possible configuration with an existing BGP implementation
   supporting the extended communities, we use a syntax similar
   to the syntax used by zebra. Let us assume that one route
   from AS3 has two peerings: one peering with AS2 and one peering with AS1.
   The configuration below shows how AS3's router could be configured to
   support the redistribution communities defined in this document. In
   the configuration in figure A, we show each extended community in
   hex format for readability reasons and only consider a subset of the
   redistribution communities. Figure A shows how AS3 would configure its
   routers to allow to request that a route announced to AS1 would be
   prepended n times before being announced and to request that a specific
   route would not be announced to AS2.


   router bgp 3
      neighbor 172.17.1.1 remote-as 1
      neighbor 172.17.1.1 route-map prepend1_as1 out
      neighbor 172.17.1.2 remote-as 2
      neighbor 172.17.1.2 route-map do_not_announce_as2 out
   ! Extended community list
   ! --------------------------
   !   action "prepend x times"
   !   filter "include AS1"
   !
   ip extcommunity-list 1 permit 0x4401810000000001
   ip extcommunity-list 2 permit 0x4402810000000001
   ip extcommunity-list 3 permit 0x4403810000000001
   ip extcommunity-list 4 permit 0x4404810000000001
   !
   ! Route-maps
   ! --------------------------
   !   action "prepend x times"
   !   filter "include AS1"
   !
   route-map prepend_as1 permit 10
     match extcommunity 1



Bonaventure et al.                                             [Page 15]


draft-ietf-ptomaine-bgp-redistribution-02.txt      Feb 2003


     set as-path prepend 1
   !
   route-map prepend_as1 permit 20
     match extcommunity 2
     set as-path prepend 2
   !
   route-map prepend_as1 permit 30
     match extcommunity 3
     set as-path prepend 3
   !
   route-map prepend_as1 permit 40
     match extcommunity 4
     set as-path prepend 4
   !
   ! Extended community list
   ! --------------------------
   !   action "do not announce"
   !   filter "include AS2"
   !
   ip extcommunity-list 5 permit 0x4410810000000002
   !
   route-map do_not_announce_as2 deny 10
     match extcommunity 5
   !
   Figure A: Sample configuration

   For a router with a small number of peers, such a manual configura­
   tion of the redistribution communities is possible. However, if the
   routers has many peers, the required configuration file may become
   very large, especially if one wants to fully support all the redis­
   tribution communities defined in this document.  In this case, a bet­
   ter solution is to rely on a direct support for the redistribution
   communities inside the BGP implementation itself as discussed in
   [Quoitin02]. With a BGP implementation supporting directly the redis­
   tribution communities, a few lines of configuration will be suffi­
   cient to enable or disable some or all of the redistribution communi­
   ties for each peer.














Bonaventure et al.                                             [Page 16]