On Aug 27, 2010, at 3:17 PM, Jeroen Massar wrote: > On 2010-08-27 21:13, Richard A Steenbergen wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 01:29:15PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote: >>> >>> Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240) >>> Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240) >>> Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240) >>> Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240) >>> Unknown BGP attribute 99 (flags: 240) >> >> Just out of curiosity, at what point will we as operators rise up >> against the ivory tower protocol designers at the IETF and demand that >> they add a mechanism to not bring down the entire BGP session because of >> a single malformed attribute? Did I miss the memo about the meeting? >> I'll bring the punch and pie. > > Complain to your vendor, especially C & J are having good enough > influence on the IETF to make such a change possible. > > > I can agree with tearing the session down when one encounters an > improperly formatted message, but an unknown attribute, while the rest > of the format of message is fine, is a silly thing to hang up on indeed.
When you are processing something, it's sometimes hard to tell if something just was mis-parsed (as I think the case is here with the "missing-2-bytes") vs just getting garbage. Perhaps there should be some way to "re-sync" when you are having this problem, or a parallel "keepalive" path similar to MACA/MCAS/MIDCAS/TCAS between the devices to talk when something bad is happening. - Jared