Action BGP Communities

Action BGP Communities can be used to control various functions of the route server. With these communities, you can:

• control the redistribution of advertised prefixes, based on an ASN or on geolocation,
• prepend your own ASN up to three times, and
• trigger the calculation of a new alternate path (if available) for your advertised prefixes before commencing maintenance.

Please note that if the $PEER-AS is a four byte AS number you have to use the BGP Large Communities.

All BGP community examples on this page are based on DE-CIX Frankfurt (AS6695). If you want to use BGP Communities at one of the other exchanges, please replace all occurrences of "6695" with the AS of the exchange:

Control of prefix redistribution

You can control which BGP announcements you send to the route servers are redistributed to other peers. This can be done based on the following criteria:

• ASN
• Edge node
• Metro region
• Country
• Continent

The redistribution can be controlled with BGP Communities and BGP Large Communities.

The following table gives an overview of available options and their corresponding BGP Communities. The according values for $SWITCH, $METRO, $COUNTRY, $CONTINENT are available here. If two or more BGP (large) Communities contradict each other, the community with the lowest evaluation order is processed.

Please note: Location-based redistribution control works in the context of GlobePEER Remote.

Example: If you peer in FRA and instruct the FRA route server to redistribute your routes only to local peers (FRA), peers connected to FRA via GlobePEER Remote will not receive them.

^{* Only useful in combination with one or more "do not announce" BGP Communities with lower priority that will allow an override (e.g. 6695:$PEER-AS can provide a selective override for 65222:$METRO)
** Only useful when announced to your local route server. E.g. if your access location is HAM then announce this community only to the HAM RS and not to other GlobePEER Remote location RS (e.g. FRA). They will not consider you as "local" and ignore any "only to local peers" Community received from remote peers. In this example, it would be sufficient to only announce to the local HAM RS and not to the RS of GlobePEER Remote locations.}

The route servers remove the aforementioned BGP Communities and BGP Large Communities from a BGP announcement before re-distributing it.

The well-known BGP Communities NO_EXPORT (65535:65281) and NO_ADVERTISE (65535:65282) are also honored; meaning that a BGP announcement marked by one of these communities is not re-distributed to any peer. If you want the route server system to add a NO_EXPORT or NO_ADVERTISE community for a given BGP announcement before re-distributing, you have to add the community (6695:65281) or (6695:65282) respectively. This is also possible on a per-peer basis using BGP Large Communities:

• (6695:901:$PEER-AS) for selective NO_EXPORT and
• (6695:902:$PEER-AS) for selective NO_ADVERTISE

More than one of the aforementioned BGP Communities and BGP Large Communities can be added to a single BGP announcement. DE-CIX recommends not adding more than 50 of these communities as it makes handling complex and error-prone. If you do need to do this, please contact Customer Service. 

All BGP Communities and BGP Large Communities that are not listed above are not touched by the route servers and transparently re-distributed. For backwards compatibility, routes with no community at all are distributed to all peers as well.

You can check this in the DE-CIX Looking Glass. If you type your ASN into the global search field, you will find all matching prefixes from all DE-CIX route servers on all DE-CIX Internet Exchanges. By clicking on a prefix, you get the prefix information dialogue with details (BGP Communities etc.). You can apply further filters, e.g. filter for a specific route server or IX. More information how to use the DE-CIX Looking Glass can be found here.

How the different communities can be used

Examples for Frankfurt

Please note: In the following examples, we only make use of Large Communities when it becomes necessary.

BGP announcements marked with the following communities are only re-distributed to AS64501 and AS64502 (both 2 Byte ASNs):

• (0:6695)
   
• (6695:64501)
   
• (6695:64502)
   

BGP announcements marked with the following communities are re-distributed to all peers/ ASNs except AS64501 and AS64502:
 

• (0:64501)
   
• (0:64502)
   
• (6695:6695)
   

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are only re-distributed to AS65550 (4 Byte ASN) and AS64501 (2 Byte ASN):

• (0:6695)
   
• (6695:1:65550)
   
• (6695:64501)

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are only re-distributed to other FRA peers:

• (65200:65212)

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are only re-distributed to peers of other DE-CIX IXPs in Germany (where GlobePEER Remote is available):

• (0:6695)
• (65213:276)

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are not re-distributed to peers of  DE-CIX MRS:

• (65222:6000)

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are not re-distributed to Americas:

• (65224:19)

BGP announcements tagged with the following communities are only re-distributed to peers of DE-CIX DUS and MUC, but not to e1.muc1 and AS65550 (4 Byte ASN):

• (0:6695)
   
• (65212:3000)
   
• (65212:9000)
   
• (65221:3096)
   
• (6695:0:65550)

AS path prepending

You can use BGP communities to prepend your own ASN up to three times. This can be done to all other peers or selectively to only certain peers.

Details:

• Setting BGP Community GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN (65535:0) on all of your advertised prefixes. The route server will set BGP local preference to 0 for these prefixes.
   
• The route server will calculate alternative paths for your advertised prefixes (if available) and redistribute these to other peers. Prefixes with no alternative path will get redistributed with BGP Community GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN.
   
• You should also apply GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN to the inbound policy of your eBGP session.
   
• After convergence has completed, you can safely shut down the BGP session. At this point, routers of other customers have learned alternative paths for your prefixes (if available) from the route server and forward traffic on the new path.