Subject: [Idr] partial bit for ext. communities?

From: "Thomas M. Knoll" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:16:22 +0100 (MET)

Folks,

within my presentation yesterday, I mentioned my observation about 
"unknown" extended communities, which are relayed in BGP nodes without 
being marked as partially processed.
see slide 13 in
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/09mar/slides/idr-5.pdf

I was sending 4 of my new ext. communities (of regular type), which got 
bundled into an extended community attribute and transferred to an 
commercial router. This in turn relayed the attribute with the partial bit 
being cleared.

This router behaviour is arguably OK, since it did understand the extended 
community attribute of type 16 and obviously did not care about the 
contained bunch of not yet known ext. communities (of regular type 0x04).

By means of this email, I would like to hear your opinion, whether you 
are contended with such behaviour OR whether a partial bit in 
each extended community would make the processing status of individual 
ext. communities clearer.

As far as I am aware of, there are no other extended communities of 
regular type around (besides my own ones - 0x04, 0x44, 0x40), which would 
give the chance to have a flags field next to the ext. community type, 
which could host the proposed ext. community specific partial bit.

Thomas.