Re: Publishing BGP communties for your network (Re: What's up with BGP communities?)

[Tom Beecher via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

> And for LGs the above repo has them all :) Only other source is
> https://bgp.tools <https://bgp.tools/> which has sometimes more details
> on some networks when folks have entered them manually there.


BGP.Tools is not the only source. onestep.net used to be the defacto source
that collated most of these.

I agree though that an entire YANG model for these is not especially
beneficial. We store communities in a similar way, text file that is human
readable but also parseable to translate when needed.

I could see a use case for this to detect WHEN an AS's published
communities **CHANGED** without having to go look for that, but with as
infrequently as most do it's kinda meh.

On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 11:36 AM Jeroen Massar via NANOG <
nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:

> > On 25 Jan 2026, at 18:31, Martin Pels via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
> wrote:
> > [..]
> >  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-grow-yang-bgp-communities/
> >
> > Using the model described here, networks can publish a JSON file with
> descriptions for the communities they use for their Autonomous System.
>
> I thought everybody just added a simple text file to:
>  https://github.com/NLNOG/lg.ring.nlnog.net/tree/main/communities
> and called it a day? That file format is simple, succint and readable by
> humans.
>
> Is the intent of that YANG document to let a computer parse it and do
> automatic setting of action communities? Or is it just to see what the
> label is?
>
>
> For my own looking glass what I do is I parse the above directory and
> translate it to a little lookup array. The two YANG ones from RIPE I parse
> in a similar way, similar to what the NLNOG LG does, all the YANG markup is
> just tossed though.
>
>
> But in the end, for most purposes it is to turn the numbers into a label
> so that one can see what the community means. And unless it is an action
> policy, no computer will be acting upon those communities as one has to
> understand the full intent (and no, an LLM will not get that yet, and
> please do not let a LLM close to BGP :) )
>
> Thus they should be good for humans setting an action community or viewing
> what the community means.
>
> Any other purposes and thus reason why to make it more complex than that?
>
>
> A WHOIS/RPSL way of being able to indicate where one stores their
> community.txt file for easy discovery would be cool though. Though that is
> likely something https://www.peeringdb.com <https://www.peeringdb.com/>
> could do and then it is solved too.
>
> And for LGs the above repo has them all :) Only other source is
> https://bgp.tools <https://bgp.tools/> which has sometimes more details
> on some networks when folks have entered them manually there.
>
> Regards,
>  Jeroen
>
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