On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 8:50 AM Mark Prior <mrp@mrp.net> wrote:
On 3/4/2024 20:37, Michael Lambert wrote:
>> On 2 Apr 2024, at 16:24, David Farmer <farmer@umn.edu> wrote:
>>
>> I had a thought.
>>
>> Does GREN or GNA-G have an ASN?
>> If not we/it could probably get one.
>>
>> My suggestion would be to use that ASN for a set of globally agreed to communities and to create an as-set that represents the entirety of the Global NREN community.
>
> I have to admit I have philosophical issues with the idea of obtaining an ASN just to use in tagging without any real plans for having it appear in an AS path in the routing table.
>

Well it does provide uniqueness, and there are plenty of assigned ASN
not in the routing table..

Mark.

There are alternatives, but I don't think they are any more palatable;

- We could choose a private ASN and overload it with our specifications. We would need to ensure the communities were stripped when leaving the Global R&E community since uniqueness isn't guaranteed.

- We could register well-known BGP communities with IANA, using the first come, first serve range specified  RFC1997.
https://www.iana.org/assignments/bgp-well-known-communities/bgp-well-known-communities.xhtml

Those options only work for BGP communities. We really shouldn't use private use or other reserved ASNs in the IRR. 

However, now that we have 32-bit ASNs, they really aren't a limited resource anymore.  A registered ASN is the right answer, in my opinion.

Thanks. 


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