BGPexpert

32-bit AS numbers in the wild

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:59:03 GMT

In january, Geoff Huston wrote to the NANOG list:

George Michaelson, Randy Bush and myself have successfully tested the implementation of 4Byte AS BGP on a public Internet transit. The above BGP RIB snapshot was taken at a 4Byte BGP speaker in North America, showing a transit path across AS 1221, AS 4637, AS 1239 and AS 3130 , with correct reconstruction of the originating AS at the other (4Byte AS) end.

At the time of this writing, their prefix is no longer visible in the global BGP table...

BGP security: learning an old dog new tricks

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 13:07:44 GMT

After lots of talk about S-BGP and soBGP over the past years, more recently, work in the IETF on making inter-domain routing more secure has shifted to a different approach. The relatively new secure inter-domain routing (sidr) working group is now working on providing a public key infrastructure that makes it possible to link an IP prefix to an origin AS with certificates. In the future, this mechanism may be used in S-BGP, soBGP or a similar mechanism, but in the mean time, it allows generating and validating filters.

Quagga

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:39:08 GMT

As Zebra progress has been glacial, a group of people created a fork under the name Quagga. Quagga is more community-based and a somewhat better choice than Zebra in an operational environment....

OpenBGPD

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 13:33:56 GMT

OpenBSD, the security conscious sibling in the BSD operating system family, has its own BGP daemon implementation: OpenBGPD....

IPv4 address use in 2006

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 16:36:17 GMT

2006 was another busy year for the five Regional Internet Registries: together, they gave out 161.48 million IPv4 addresses, just shy of the 165.45 million given out in 2005 as measured on january first 2006. Lots more information in the 2006 IPv4 Address Use Report....

32-bit AS numbers are here

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:17:23 GMT

If you want to use the BGP routing protocol, you need an Autonomous System number. These AS numbers were 16 bits in size until now, allowing for around 64000 ASes, and more than half of those have been given out already. To avoid problems when we run out of AS numbers, the IETF came up with modifications to BGP to allow for 32-bit AS numbers, as I explained in a posting about a year ago.

Obviously, at some point someone has to bite the bullet and start using one of these new AS numbers. This bullet biting may happen fairly soon, as...

Changing BGP TCP MD5 passwords

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:16:59 GMT

The BGP TCP MD5 password mechanism (RFC 2385) is very useful to protect BGP sessions from attempts at unpleasantness by third parties. However, it is rather simplistic. One of the flaws is that there are no provisions for changing the password. In the old days, setting a new password for a neighbor would cause Cisco routers to tear down and reestablish the BGP session. Today, the session survives if the password or key is changed at more or less the same time at both ends. This requires a good deal of coordination. I must say that I can't remem...

Provider Independent IPv6 addresses

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:30:41 GMT

Last week, ARIN, the organization in charge of distributing IP addresses in North America, changed its IPv6 address policy so it's now possible to get Provider Independent (PI) IPv6 address space.

According to the ARIN Number Resource Policy Manual:

To qualify for a direct assignment, an organization must:

not be an IPv6 LIR; and
qualify for an IPv4 assignment or allocation from ARIN under the IPv4 policy currently in effect.

This is both good news,...