On 23-aug-2005, at 15:16, Paul Jakma wrote:
then i would prefer going ahead with the new solution and picking it up if it works!
Well, in order to justify the hassle of invalidating existing implementations of the draft as it stands, I suspect there'd need to be sufficient examples of real-world problems with passive BGP 'readers' to get consensus in IDR to change.
This is exactly why people shouldn't implement drafts except possibly as a private in-house feasibility study. There has been a huge inflation of the status of various IETF documents, to the degree than BGP today apparently isn't considered mature enough to be an "internet standard".
BTW, I find the notion that there is a new attribute that carries 32- bit AS numbers while at the same time the original AS path can either hold 16-bit or 32-bit AS numbers depending on the capabilities of the peer rather strange. Why not simply keep the current AS path 16 bits and create a new 32-bit one?
And what's with that "octet" thing, anyway.
