Read RFC1997 and RFC1998 for more info n depth understanding of communities and their value/use.
-- John Fraizer LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnfraizer/ On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 5:02 PM William Herrin via NANOG < [email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 1:55 PM Ronan Pigott <[email protected]> wrote: > > IIUC, a "route map" is a configuration local to the BGP router. So, an > > operator may make some decision about the meaning of a community and then > > attach it to routes advertised to their peers, but no peer can reasonably > > act on the community information without understanding the meaning > intended > > by the owner, right? > > Correct. > > > So if I operated a network and my BGP peer advertises > > routes that belong to a bunch of communities, how can I possibly learn > the > > intended meaning of those communities to configure a sensible route map > for > > my router? > > You ask your peer. In some cases, the peer writes a web page which > explains what their communities mean so that they can just say, "look > at this web page." And then you have sites like bgp.tools which > collect the information from the various web pages individual networks > have published into a large database. > > Because the communities have arbitrary meanings, those meanings are > communicated person to person, not machine to machine. > > Regards, > Bill Herrin > > > -- > For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/ > _______________________________________________ > NANOG mailing list > > https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/IAFKURAFB3FOWBUO4IHQEUILNESW5MO7/ _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/N544SMULMOSTOGWNZWOSLWMM7QCOMZFJ/
