[arin-ppml] Request for staff: 4-byte ASN data

[Jon Lewis]

On Sat, 16 May 2015, Michael Peddemors wrote:

> Took one of our upstream providers almost 2 months before they could support 
> our 4-byte ASN..
>
> It should be noted that this can affect how long it takes a company to get 
> utilization numbers up..

Were they willing to tell you what it was about their network that 
couldn't support adding a transit customer with a 4-byte ASN?  Cisco and 
Juniper have supported these for years.  If they're running older code 
that doesn't support them, a software update is probably long overdue.

The only real annoying issue I've encountered with 4-byte ASNs is that 
networks that support community tags for TE generally can't do it for 
4-byte ASNs since the usual way is tags like ASN:code where the code says 
what to do when advertising to the ASN.  Since standard communities are 
only 32-bits, and the human readable format is 16-bits:16-bits, 32-bit 
ASNs "don't fit" unless you make the whole system less human readable and 
assign a sequential number to each peer, using those in place of ASN in 
the community tags.  Extended communities are big enough to work for this 
sort of thing, but I'm not aware of anyone using them that way, and AFAIK, 
platform support for such is limited.

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  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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