CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_

Reported by Elliot Schwartz/UUNET Canada

Minutes of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group (IDR)
April 5th, 1995 / 1530-1730



Agenda

   o BGP/IDRP Route Server
   o BGP Communities
   o Routing Confederations
   o AS Guidelines
   o BGP-4 to Full Standard



BGP/IDRP Route Server

Dimitry Haskin's Internet-Draft, draft-haskin-bgp-idrp-mesh-routing-00.txt,
will be moved along as an Experimental RFC after review by Dennis Ferguson.

This document describes the use and detailed design of Route Servers
for dissemination of routing information among BGP/IDRP speaking
routers.

The intention of the proposed technique is to reduce overhead and
management complexity of maintaining numerous direct BGP/IDRP
sessions which otherwise might be required or desired among routers
within a single routing domain as well as among routers in different
domains that are connected to a common switched fabric (e.g. an ATM
cloud).



BGP Communities - Paul Traina

Paul Traina presented an overview of the Internet-Draft,
draft-chandra-bgp-communities-01.txt.

This document describes an extension to BGP which may be used to pass
additional information to both neighboring and remote BGP peers.

The intention of the proposed technique is to aid in policy
administration and reduce the management complexity of maintaining
the Internet.

Cengiz Alaettinoglu/ISI brought up the idea of putting in a provision for
defining intersections and unions of communities (for aggregation purposes).

Jon Postel agreed that the IANA would take care of registering BGP attribute
numbers. We need to send a list of the currently used ones to him.

Andrew Partan asked about methods of grouping communities. Paul said there
could be a way to delete or modify a range of communities. 

There was a discussion on what to do with the Internet-Draft. Dimitry said
Bay Networks could impliment this attribute. It will be moved to an
Experimental RFC after being reviewed by Dennis.



Routing Confederations - Paul Traina

Paul Traina presented an overview of the Internet-Draft,
draft-traina-bgp-confed-02.txt.

This document describes an extension to BGP which may be used to
create a confederation of autonomous systems which is represented as
one single autonomous system to BGP peers external to the
confederation.

The intention of the proposed technique is to aid in policy
administration and reduce the management complexity of maintaining a
large autonomous system.

Yakov Rekhter asked if the internal AS numbers should come out of a private
address space, similar to IP addresses under RFC1597. Concensus was that 
this is a good idea.

Vadim Antonov mentioned confederations would help in identifying who uses
what AS numbers. (i.e. a network provider would appear to be one AS
externally). He said that Sprint uses something like this in production,
and that it helps with routing convergence since next hops are
consistant.

Paul will do more research before this Internet-Draft is considered
for Experimental.



AS Guidelines 

John Hawkinson provided a brief recap of the Internet-Draft,
draft-ietf-idr-autosys-guide-02.txt, and discussion to date.

Peter Lothberg agreed with the aim of the paper in general, but was unhappy
with how it had been used by the RIPE NCC. He spoke about a specific case
in which an AS number was refused (based on the content of the paper),
where he considered it legitimate.

A discussion about Peter's case, the role of registries, and the possibility
of AS number exhaustion occured. Most people felt that the registries
should use this document in assignment.

The creation of a private AS number space for use in confederations was
discussed. It was suggested that we ask the IANA to set aside the top
1K AS numbers for this, and reserve the top 8K in case. The exact numbers
will be discussed off-line and reported to the IANA.

It was suggested that transit providers should probably filter these by
default. (Like IP numbers under RFC1597)

Concensus was to send this Internet-Draft to the IESG as Proposed Standard,
as soon as final editing was done.



BGP-4 to Full Standard - Yakov Rekhter

The whole internet runs BGP-4, and there are multiple interoperable
implimentations.  The document was a Draft Standard at last meeting.

Paul will update the experience docuemnt. If there are any new
implementations (besides those mentioned in the document), people should
send e-mail to Paul.

Editorial changes should be sent to Tony Li and Yakov Rekhter.

There was concensus that this should be a Full Standard by the next IETF.