Subject: Network Outage
Jacques,
It seems that an ISP was leaking its BGP confederations to
the world at large. Generally confederations are stripped off at
exit points, so it seems to have caught most providers by surprise.
The way that Cisco routers deal with confederations, they
append the confederation at the end of the AS path in
parenthesis. Junipers and Cisco's accept this behavior readily,
and therefore most of the Internet was
unaffected, as they are the larger players. However, Riverstone
and Foundry, among many others I'm sure, have deemed such
behavior as inappropriate, and when the router receives a route
tagged in such a way, they reset the peer
and return an "invalid AS path". It seems that this is what has
plagued you today. Our apologies for this incident, and you may
take small comfort in the knowledge that we have learned the lesson
of the day, as have many other providers, and this sort of
thing will not find the arms of the Internet quite so wide open in
the future.
Linear Mode
