North American Network Operators Group
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Re: What's with all the long aspaths?

  • From: Hank Nussbacher
  • Date: Thu Oct 23 15:33:44 2008
On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Philip Smith wrote:

Jon Lewis said the following on 23/10/08 12:39: 
Is there something silly going around?  I doubt I'm the only one
noticing these being triggered by our generous maxas-limit setting.

Oct  9 23:01:46: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 27754 27754 27754 ...
Oct 17 11:10:40: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 43413 43413 43413 ...
Oct 22 06:34:09: %BGP-6-ASPATH: ... 38230 38230 38230 ...

Anyone have theories as to what these networks are trying to accomplish?

Theories include:

- trying to make a /20 announcement more important than a component /24
by prepending the /24 out of sight (i'm not joking, some people really
believe this!!)

- trying to over-ride policy that their upstream provider has applied
(e.g. my prepended /20 is a backup to my main /20 announcement but my
upstream on the backup path is local pref-ing high to make them look
more "peerable")

There are bound to be other reasons... :-)

My theory - some netadmin trying to see if anything bad happens when he does it. Sort of like the Darwin winner who's last words are "I wonder what would happen if I tri..."

-Hank