North American Network Operators Group
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Re: BGP Path Filtering

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Sat May 17 11:33:07 2003 
On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 23:58 Canada/Eastern, Sean Donelan wrote:
Are you suggesting that its a bad idea to make things appear "too easy,"
and by suggesting more complex configs we'll scare off the bottom rung
of network engineers. Maybe.
Not really; I'm suggesting that a few more minutes worth of thinking at day one will save many more minutes of pain down the road.

Barry Greene's & Philip Smith's book "Cisco ISP Essentials: A
comprehensive guide to the best common practices for Internet service
providers" uses static prefix filters almost exclusively in all of its
example "best practices" for ISPs.  Although the ISP book is a useful
reference for network engineers at any size network, the examples
work best for networks of a certain size.
And presumably for networks which never expect to grow. In my experience the networks that don't grow are also the ones that shrivel and die.

I think that the message "community strings are hard" (like its friends "BGP is hard" and "let's turn on RIP") need to stop propagating. It is just not that difficult to do things right the first time, and you don't need to be a bigger network than a pair of 2501s with a small handful of external BGP sessions to see the benefit of it.


Joe