### casually decided to expound upon Vijay Gill <vijay@umbc.edu> the
### following thoughts about "Re: Persistent BGP peer flapping - do you
### care? ":
What else causes repeative peer bounces other than the broken prefix?
Well... I remember when bad capability negotiation messages would cause the
session to drop. Although this is before any update messages were sent.
However it still caused repeating session bouncing.
IMO, bad negototiation messages are a bit more indicitave of a
malfunctioning router that a bad prefix is, as it's unquestioningly
something that was originated by the router in question, where a bad
prefix could easily have originated elsewhere. Receipt of a malformed
negotiation message should definitely be grounds for terminating the BGP
session.
Whether or not a BGP peer shuts down the peering session upon receipt of a
bad prefix, it should definitely refuse to propagate the invalid data. The
fact that Brand "C" routers propagated the bad prefix was the primary
cause of what happened in October.
-C