RFC 5291, "Outbound Route Filtering Capability for BGP-4", August 2008

Errata ID: 3468
Status: Rejected
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: David Lamparter
Date Reported: 2013-01-22
Rejected by: Stewart Bryant
Date Rejected: 2013-02-06

Section 5 says:

5. Outbound Route Filtering Capability


   A BGP speaker that is willing to receive ORF entries from its peer,
   or a BGP speaker that would like to send ORF entries to its peer,
   advertises this to the peer by using the Outbound Route Filtering
   Capability, as described below.

   The Outbound Route Filtering Capability is a new BGP Capability
   [BGP-CAP] defined as follows:

      Capability code: 3

      Capability length: variable

      Capability value: one or more of the entries as shown in Figure 3.

         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Address Family Identifier (2 octets)             |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Reserved (1 octet)                               |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Subsequent Address Family Identifier (1 octet)   |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Number of ORFs (1 octet)                         |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | ORF Type (1 octet)                               |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Send/Receive (1 octet)                           |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | ...                                              |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | ORF Type (1 octet)                               |
         +--------------------------------------------------+
         | Send/Receive (1 octet)                           |
         +--------------------------------------------------+

         Figure 3: Outbound Route Filtering Capability Encoding

Notes:

RFC5291 does not specify how the ORF capability is supposed to be used
in conjunction with multiple enabled AFI/SAFI combinations. The text
can be interpreted as either "one capability instance will be sent,
carrying multiple blocks as described in Figure 3" or as "the
capability will be supplied in more than instance".

Note also that RFC3392 [BGP-CAP] Section 4 reads:

BGP speakers MAY include more than one instance of a capability (as
identified by the Capability Code) with non-zero Capability Length
field, but with different Capability Value, and either the same or
different Capability Length. Processing of these capability
instances is specific to the Capability Code and MUST be described in
the document introducing the new capability.

Latter description of how multiple instances of the capability are to be
processed - albeit relatively obvious - is nowhere to be found in RFC5291.


Respectfully requesting a clarification,

David Lamparter
--VERIFIER NOTES--
This is beyond the scope of an errata system to address.

I think that the right process is for the WG to decide the answer
and if necessary for someone to write up a short update to
RFC5291

I have therefore rejected this errata.

The thread in the IDR list starts at
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/idr/current/msg12075.html

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