Re: Do you use or see FQDN capability?

["Dale W. Carder via NANOG" <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Hey John,


Thus spake John Kristoff via NANOG (nanog () lists nanog org) on Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 10:53:43AM -0600:
> On Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:14:10 -0600
> John Kristoff <jtk () dataplane org> wrote:
>
> > I'd be interested in hearing if people set a hostname on their BGP
> > routers and send it to peers (internal and/or external).
> >
> > I'm also interested in hearing if you see external peers sending it to
> > you.
> >
> > I know BIRD and FRR support this capability, but I"m not aware of
> > others and I'm guessing it is relatively rare in practice?
>
> Most of what I learned about usage was in response to this thread, but
> I had a few brief responses from others elsewhere.  Awareness and
> interest in it remains lukewarm at best.
>
> I soon after realized that ExaBGP supported this capability as well.
>
> The original discussion and reaction (pro and con) to the feature
> is here:
>
>   <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/search/?q=%22draft-walton-bgp-hostname-capability%22>
>
> Also note, there is an IANA assignment for it (73).
>
>   <https://www.iana.org/assignments/capability-codes/capability-codes.xhtml>
>
> I'm guessing this capability will just sort of live on forever, rarely
> used until, if ever, those software implementations decide they want to
> remove it.

I have to admit I didn't even know it existed.

In our measurement/monitoring systems we do record the BGP router ID of
every neighbor.  This is handy as it should[*] be unique to an AS and 
can help with troubleshooting for where you may have multiple peering
sessions to the same router, particularly across address-families.

IMHO, adding a hostname field seems at best duplicative and probably is
just another thing to be poorly maintained and go stale over time.

Dale

[*] that should is lower-case in RFC6286 section 2.1 ...huh
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