I will not be able to attend the MICE UG meeting tonight.
However, I would like to add my thoughts regarding route advertisement
control using BGP communities.
I am strongly in favor of this capability being added to the route
servers. Specifically, I'd like to see the ability to block
advertisement to particular ASes or to prepend just to particular
AS(es). Perhaps something like Level3, Sprint, and others use:
65000:XXX - do not announce to AS XXX
65001:XXX - prepend one AS to AS XXX
65002:XXX - prepend two ASes to AS XXX
65003:XXX - prepend three ASes to AS XXX
65004:XXX - prepend four ASex to AS XXX
I just had to block one customer's netblock at MICE because Netflix
traffic shifted in an undesirable manner yesterday. In this case, they
really just needed to prepend Netflix at MICE, but since that wasn't an
option they requested that we just block their netblock completely from
the MICE route servers.
BGP Communities give individual MICE members the ability to control
their route advertisements to best suit their needs and routing policies
without having to block the MICE route servers completely.