Re: RPSL: Providers exchanging full route tables ...

[Berislav Todorovic <]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Low, Adam wrote:

>> The situation arises when we exchange full route tables with another
>> provider, we then in turn should announce their prefixes listed in
>> their macro onto our other providers and they too should do the same
>> for our respective macro. So by adding each others macros to each
>> others macros, we effectively create loops.

That issue has little (if almost anything) to do with RPSL. It's rather an
issue of the software you're using to query the macro and convert it into
an expanded list of AS numbers.

Merit people seem to have solved that issue by implementing a loop-free
AS macro expansion function on the RADB whois server directly. So, if
you included AS-YYY into your macro AS-XXX - try:

whois -h whois.radb.net \!iAS-XXX,1

That will give yopu the fully expanded list of AS numbers referred from
AS-XXX and all its submacros. Of course, that will give AS-YYY routes
in the output as well, like it or not. Sometimes it might be handy, but
sometimes it might be a problem, if you want to distinguish between
AS-XXX and AS-YYY at some point of time. In the latter case, rather
create a new macro:

as-set:   AS-XXXYYY
members:  AS-XXX, AS-YYY

than to include AS-YYY into AS-XXX ... ;-)

Regards,
Beri

---------    Berislav Todorovic, Network Engineer    ---------
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