Internet-Draft | BGP Community YANG | August 2024 |
Pels | Expires 20 February 2025 | [Page] |
This document defines a YANG data model for the structured specification of BGP communities. The model provides operators with a way to publish their locally defined BGP communities in a standardised format.¶
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ISP operators use BGP communities[RFC1997][RFC4360][RFC8092] to add information to prefix announcements or to let customers influence routing behaviour inside the network of the ISP. Each ISP defines for itself which BGP communities to support and how the structure of these communities should be interpreted. This document provides a YANG[RFC7950] module for describing the structure and meaning of BGP communities, Extended BGP communities and Large BGP communities. ISP operators can use this to publish their community definitions in a standardised format.¶
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all capitals, as shown here.¶
ISP operators may define various BGP communities that have local significance inside of their network. These communities could be used to add miscellaneous information to a prefix announcement. For example, a community "64501:1:528" may signify that AS64501 is originating a prefix from a point of presence in The Netherlands (ISO 3166-1 code 528). Alternatively, communities could be used to allow customers of an ISP to control routing behavior of their prefixes inside the ISP. For example, a community "64501:4:64498" attached to a prefix advertised to AS64501 by a customer may be interpreted by AS64501 to mean that this prefix must not be propagated to AS64498.¶
For both use cases it is necessary for the ISP to communicate the meaning of their locally defined communities to others. Currently this is typically done by publishing a list of communities on a web page, or as a remark inside an autnum object in the Internet Routing Registry. This makes it cumbersome to determine if and where an ISP publishes community information. The lack of a well-defined structure makes it hard to develop tools for parsing community information.¶
The purpose of the YANG model defined in this document is to provide a standardized format for publishing community definitions. These definitions help applications to interpret the structure and purpose of BGP communities. For example, looking glasses may use the published definitions to parse communities seen in BGP announcements and display their meaning. Another potential use case is in generating routing policy configurations based on community definitions published by an upstream ASN. This could be done automatically using external tooling to generate router configurations, or inside a router's command-line interface by importing the definitions and providing the CLI-user with available choices for manual configuration.¶
Note that this document only describes a model for the publishing format of community definitions. The publishing location and publishing mechanism used are outside the scope of this specification.¶
The following tree diagram provides an overview of the ietf-bgp-communities.yang data model.¶
The BGP Communities YANG Module contains the elements described in this section. The full contents of the module can be found in Appendix A. Several elements in this module use data types from [I-D.ietf-netmod-rfc6991-bis]. These data types are represented with the prefix "inet".¶
A required value of type "uint32", containing the version number for the community set. This value wraps and should be compared using sequence space arithmetic.¶
An optional value of type "inet:uri", describing the publication point for the community set.¶
An optional value of type "string" with a maximum length of 65535, providing information about the specified set of communities.¶
An optional value of type "inet:uri", describing a webpage where maintainer contact information may be found.¶
A list of objects defining contact information for the maintainer(s) of the community set. Each object contains the following elements.¶
A required value of type "inet:email-address", containing the e-mail address of the contact.¶
An optional value of type "string" with a maximum length of 255, containing the name of the contact.¶
An optional value of type "string" with a maximum length of 255, describing the role of the contact.¶
An optional value of type "string" with a maximum length of 255, containing the organization of the contact.¶
An optional value of type "string" with a maximum length of 255, containing the organizational unit of the contact.¶
A list of objects defining Regular ([RFC1997]) BGP communities. Each object contains the following elements.¶
A required value of type "community-name", containing the name of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-name" type is defined in Section 6.2.¶
An optional value of type "community-category", containing the category of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-category" type is defined in Section 6.3.¶
An optional value of type "community-description", containing a description of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-description" type is defined in Section 6.4.¶
A required value of type "two-octet-as-number", containing the Autonomous Sytem Number set in the Global Administrator part of this community.¶
The structure of the "two-octet-as-number" type is defined in Section 6.1.¶
A group of elements that describe the Local Administrator part of the community. This object contains the following elements.¶
An optional value of type "localadmin-format", describing the encoding format in which fields are to be parsed (see Section 7.2).¶
The structure of the "localadmin-format" type is defined in Section 6.5. If this leaf is not defined, the default "decimal" encoding is assumed.¶
A list of objects that together form the Local Administrator part of the community. The combined length values of all fields MUST NOT exceed the maximum length of the Local Administrator part of the community.¶
A required value of type "field-name", containing the name of the field.¶
The structure of the "field-name" type is defined in Section 6.6.¶
An optional value of type "uint8", containing the length of the field. If the expected field format (Section 5.6.5.1) is "decimal", this is a number of digits. In case the expected field format is "binary", this is a number of bits.¶
If this leaf is not defined, the length is assumed to be the maximum allowed length of the entire field list. In this case the field list MUST NOT contain more than one element.¶
A required value of type "field-pattern", containing a pattern used for matching the field's contents.¶
The structure of the "field-pattern" type is defined in Section 6.7.¶
An optional value of type "field-description", containing a description of the pattern. This description can be used to provide meaning to specific values for a field.¶
The structure of the "field-description" type is defined in Section 6.8.¶
A list of objects defining Extended ([RFC4360]) BGP communities. Two-Octet and Four-Octet AS Specific communities are supported by this specification. Each object contains the following elements.¶
A required value of type "community-name", containing the name of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-name" type is defined in Section 6.2.¶
An optional value of type "community-category", containing the category of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-category" type is defined in Section 6.3.¶
An optional value of type "community-description", containing a description of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-description" type is defined in Section 6.4.¶
A required value of type "uint8", containing the high-order Type of the community.¶
A required value of type "uint8", containing the low-order Sub-Type of the community.¶
For Two-Octet AS Specific communities: A required value of type "two-octet-as-number", containing the Autonomous Sytem Number set in the Global Administrator part of this community.¶
The structure of the "two-octet-as-number" type is defined in Section 6.1.¶
For Four-Octet AS Specific communities: A required value of type "inet:as-number", containing the Autonomous Sytem Number set in the Global Administrator part of this community.¶
A group of elements that describe the Local Administrator part of the community. This object contains the following elements.¶
An optional value of type "localadmin-format", describing the encoding format in which fields are to be parsed (see Section 7.2).¶
The structure of the "localadmin-format" type is defined in Section 6.5. If this leaf is not defined, the default "decimal" encoding is assumed.¶
A list of objects that together form the Local Administrator part of the community. The combined length values of all fields MUST NOT exceed the maximum length of the Local Administrator part of the community.¶
The supported leafs in this list are identical to those described in Section 5.6.5.2.¶
A list of objects defining Large ([RFC8092]) BGP communities. Each object contains the following elements.¶
A required value of type "community-name", containing the name of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-name" type is defined in Section 6.2.¶
An optional value of type "community-category", containing the category of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-category" type is defined in Section 6.3.¶
An optional value of type "community-description", containing a description of this community.¶
The structure of the "community-description" type is defined in Section 6.4.¶
A required value of type "inet:as-number", containing the Autonomous Sytem Number set in the Global Administrator part of this community.¶
A group of elements that describe the Local Data Part 1 section of the community. This object contains the following elements.¶
An optional value of type "localadmin-format", describing the encoding format in which fields are to be parsed (see Section 7.2).¶
The structure of the "localadmin-format" type is defined in Section 6.5. If this leaf is not defined, the default "decimal" encoding is assumed.¶
A list of objects that together form the Local Data Part 1 section of the community. The combined length values of all fields MUST NOT exceed the maximum length of the "Local Data Part 1" section of the community.¶
The supported leafs in this list are identical to those described in Section 5.6.5.2.¶
A group of elements that describe the Local Data Part 2 section of the community. This object contains the following elements.¶
An optional value of type "localadmin-format", describing the encoding format in which fields are to be parsed (see Section 7.2).¶
The structure of the "localadmin-format" type is defined in Section 6.5. If this leaf is not defined, the default "decimal" encoding is assumed.¶
A list of objects that together form the Local Data Part 2 section of the community. The combined length values of all fields MUST NOT exceed the maximum length of the "Local Data Part 2" section of the community.¶
The supported leafs in this list are identical to those described in Section 5.6.5.2.¶
Several of the elements defined in Section 5 use custom data types. These data types are defined here.¶
A Two-Octet Autonomous System Number, as defined in [RFC1930].¶
A string specifying the name of a BGP community. Names may be up to 255 characters long and MUST NOT contain spaces or tabs.¶
An enum specifying the category of a BGP community. Possible categories are "informational" and "action", as described in [RFC8195].¶
A string specifying the description of a BGP community. Descriptions may be up to 65535 characters long.¶
An enum specifying the encoding for a localadmin/localdata field. Possible encodings are "decimal" for decimal numbers and "binary" for bit strings.¶
A string specifying the name of a BGP community localadmin/localdata field. Names may be up to 255 characters long and MUST NOT contain spaces or tabs.¶
A string specifying the pattern of a BGP community localadmin/localdata field. Patterns may be up to 4095 characters long and are described as POSIX Extended Regular Expressions (see [IEEE.1003-2.1992], section 2.8.4).¶
A string specifying the description of a BGP community localadmin/localdata field. Descriptions may be up to 65535 characters long.¶
Operators SHOULD only publish BGP community definitions for networks they control. This may include communities where the Global Administrator field contains a private ASN, if this community has a local meaning inside the network of the publisher.¶
When publishing community definitions with overlapping field patterns, these definitions MUST be ordered from most to least preferred. This ensures parsers can perform deterministic matching (see Section 7.2). For example, a definition for a single community "64500:123" needs to be specified before a definition that matches a covering range of communities "64500:*".¶
A published BGP community definition can be used by parsers to display information about a received community. If a received community matches multiple published community definitions, the first matching definition in the published order takes precedence.¶
Parsers that use published community definitions from multiple operators SHOULD NOT attempt to match received communities where the Global Administrator field contains a private ASN, unless they have some method to determine which published definition is the authoritative one.¶
By default, communities are compared using the decimal representation of the fields. If "format" for a Local Administrator or Local Data Part is set to "binary", the fields in the received community are converted to strings of zeros and ones before comparison.¶
Applications that parse these community definitions SHOULD reject objects that do not comply with the rules described in this document. Furthermore, parsers SHOULD check that the sum of the specified Local Administrator or Local Data Part field lengths in each community definition does not exceed the local part size of the specified community type. For example, a Regular BGP community definition with format "decimal" containing a field of length 4 and a field of length 2 would be illegal, as the Local Administrator field has a maximum length of 65535 (5 digits).¶
This document registers the following XML namespace URN in the "IETF XML Registry", following the format defined in [RFC3688]:¶
TODO¶
This document registers the following YANG module in the "YANG Module Names" registry [RFC6020]:¶
TODO¶
This document registers the following entry in the "IETF YANG SID" registry [I-D.ietf-core-sid]:¶
TODO¶
RFC-EDITOR: Please remove this section and the accompanying reference(s) before publication.¶
This section records the status of known implementations of the protocol defined by this specification at the time of posting of this Internet-Draft, and is based on a proposal described in [RFC7942]. The description of implementations in this section is intended to assist the IETF in its decision processes in progressing drafts to RFCs. Please note that the listing of any individual implementation here does not imply endorsement by the IETF. Furthermore, no effort has been spent to verify the information presented here that was supplied by IETF contributors. This is not intended as, and must not be construed to be, a catalog of available implementations or their features. Readers are advised to note that other implementations may exist.¶
According to [RFC7942], "this will allow reviewers and working groups to assign due consideration to documents that have the benefit of running code, which may serve as evidence of valuable experimentation and feedback that have made the implemented protocols more mature. It is up to the individual working groups to use this information as they see fit".¶
The following networks are known to publish BGP community definitions according to this specification.¶
ASN | Publication URI | YANG model revision |
---|---|---|
197000 | as197000.json | 2024-06-15 |
25152 | as25152.json | 2024-06-15 |
The following known parser implementations exist.¶
Name | YANG model revision |
---|---|
NLNOG Looking Glass | 2024-06-15 |
The YANG module described in this document may be used to specify BGP community definitions in different encoding formats, such as XML, JSON or CBOR. Applications that parse these community definitions SHOULD reject objects that do not comply with the rules described in this document. Furthermore, parsers SHOULD check that the sum of the specified Local Administrator or Local Data Part field lengths in each community definition does not exceed the local part size of the specified community type.¶
This section contains the complete YANG module defined in this document.¶
This section shows example use cases for the YANG module defined in this document, using JSON[RFC7951] encoding.¶
A JSON definition for the example Large BGP community described in [RFC8195], section 4.1.1 looks as follows.¶
The author would like to thank Jeffrey Haas, Luuk Hendriks, Jasper den Hertog, Teun Vink, Tom Petch and Dale Carder for contributing ideas and feedback to this document.¶