On Mon, Jan 04, 2010 at 01:30:39PM +0100, Erik Romijn wrote:
> Hi Ondrej,
> 
> Ondrej Zajicek wrote:
> > I am implementing MRT dump feature in BIRD Internet Routing Daemon [1]
> 
> I have done quite some of the work on implementing AS4 MRT support in
> Quagga, and am one of the current maintainers of libbgpdump.

Thank you for the answer.

> >  - The most important question is whether difference in BGP4MP_MESSAGE
> >    and BGP4MP_MESSAGE_AS4 is just in MRT message header format, or if it
> >    is also semantic information whether these BGP messages were received
> >    in 'AS4-style' session or 'old' session (and therefore whether
> >    AS_PATH attribute in UPDATE messages contains 2B or 4B AS numbers).
> 
> For the current implementation in Quagga there is semantic information.
> The code checks whether the AS4 capability is present on the session
> and, if so, uses BGP4MP_MESSAGE_AS4. If the AS4 capability is absent, it
> will use BGP4MP_MESSAGE and write the AS_PATH and AS4_PATH attributes as
> received from the peer.

I examined the behavior of Quagga and found this behavior, but with
one exception - first message (OPEN meesage) of the session is always
logged as BGP4MP_MESSAGE, even if it contains AS4 capability.
This seems a bit crazy to be, for example it does not allow to
store real AS numbers.

I tested Quagga version 0.99.6, so i don't know if it is not fixed in
later releases, but latest bgpdump tool expects this behavior - it
parses OPEN messages stored in BGP4MP_MESSAGE_AS4 incorrectly.

> However, I am not entirely sure whether it should be an explicit
> requirement to store this semantic information in this way.

This has two sides - if it is not a requirement, it cannot be expected
by tools processing stored MRT dumps. And current bgpudmp tool expects
that. It fails to parse AS_PATHs in 'old-style' UPDATEs stored
BGP4MP_MESSAGE_AS4.

-- 
Ondrej 'SanTiago' Zajicek (email: [email protected])
OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."
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