Subject: [Idr] Protocol Action: 'Deprecation of BGP Path Attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and 243' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129-02.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2017 07:59:41 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Deprecation of BGP Path Attribute values 30, 31, 129, 241, 242, and
   243'
  (draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129-02.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Inter-Domain Routing Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Alvaro Retana, Alia Atlas and Deborah
Brungard.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-idr-deprecate-30-31-129/

Technical Summary

   This document requests IANA to mark BGP path attribute values 30, 31,
   129, 241, 242, and 243 as "deprecated". These values were found to be
   in use in the Internet, despite not having been allocated by IANA.

Working Group Summary

   This document arises because as part of the development of the large 
   communities specification, values 30 and 31 were discovered to be "squatted" 
   on by fielded implementations. Subsequently, two other implementations were 
   found to be "squatting" on the other values. There was some debate in the working 
   group as to whether it was better to deprecate the code points or to somehow "punish" 
   the offending implementers. One of the arguments in favor of deprecation was that 
   pragmatically speaking, no implementer would reasonably want to use one of the 
   tainted code points and if forced to do so, no operator would be excited to deploy the 
   resulting feature. The deprecation process was identified as the appropriate one to allow 
   IANA to flag them as unfit for use. There was good working group consensus for this 
   position.

Document Quality

   This is a trivial process document. It has received good WG attention including review 
   by people associated with all parties "squatting" on the affected path attribute values.

Personnel

Document Shepherd: John Scudder
Responsible Area Director: Alvaro Retana