Version Capability for BGP
draft-abraitis-bgp-version-capability-02

Abstract

In this document, we introduce a new BGP capability that allows the advertisement of a BGP speaker's version. This new BGP capability is considered experimental and mostly used for testing and development purposes.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."

This Internet-Draft will expire on May 25, 2020.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2019 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Scope of Experimentation
• 3. Specification of Requirements
• 4. Version Capability
• 5. Operation
• 6. IANA Considerations
• 7. Security Considerations
• 8. References
• 8.1. Normative References
• 8.2. Informative References
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

In modern data center designs, we tend to have conventional hosts participating in the routing process. And the fleet of hosts has different versions of routing daemon. This means that troubleshooting is a crucial part to quickly identify the root cause. This document introduces new BGP capability to advertise the version of routing daemon.

Despite it is treated as experimental it could be handled separately depending on the routing daemon.

2. Scope of Experimentation

This memo is published as an Experimental RFC. The purpose of the experimental period is to provide the community time to analyze and evaluate the methods defined in this document, particularly with regard to the wide variety of DNS zones in use on the Internet.

The duration of the experiment is expected to be no less than two years from the publication of this document. If the experiment is successful, it is expected that the findings of the experiment will result in an updated document for Standards Track approval.

3. Specification of Requirements

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

4. Version Capability

The Version Capability is a new BGP capability [RFC5492].

                +--------------------------------+
                |    Version Length (1 octet)    |
                +--------------------------------+
                |      Version (variable)        |
                +--------------------------------+
            

Figure 1

Version Length:

• The number of characters in the Version

Version:

• The Version encoded via UTF-8

5. Operation

The Version capability SHOULD only be used for displaying the version of a speaker in order to make troubleshooting easier. You have a bunch of routers with a number of upstreams each. All of them are with a different operating system and routing daemon installed. Assuming that a specific feature is not working or a bug which is not fixed in an appropriate version, would allow us to quickly identify the pattern which versions are affected. Below is an example of implementation in [FRRouting] how it looks like with version advertised by a BGP sender:

:~# vtysh -c 'show ip bgp neighbors 192.168.0.1 json' \
> | jq '."192.168.0.1".neighborCapabilities.versions'
{
  "advertisedVersion": "FRRouting 7.2-dev-MyOwnFRRVersion",
  "receivedVersion": "FRRouting 7.2-dev-MyOwnFRRVersion-gc68bb14"
}
            

Figure 2

6. IANA Considerations

IANA is requested to assign a capability number for the Version Capability in this document from the BGP Capabilities Codes registry.

7. Security Considerations

All drafts are required to have a security considerations section. See RFC 3552 for a guide.

8. References

8.1. Normative References

8.2. Informative References

Author's Address