BGP communities

RoutedBits tags every route it sends you with informational communities, and honors a set of action communities you can attach to your announcements to control how they're propagated across the network.

Communities are expressed as large communities in the form (4242420207, function, parameter), where 4242420207 is the RoutedBits ASN. DN42's standard routing-policy communities are also honored where noted below.

Informational communities

Set by RoutedBits on routes advertised to you. Use them to reason about path quality and origin — they're advisory and never required.

CommunityMeaning
64511:<d42_region>DN42 Region (only set on originated routes)
4242420207:100:404RPKI not-found route (Local Preference set 80)
4242420207:100:666Soft-failed RPKI route (used internally)
4242420207:120:<instance_id>RB router this route was learned on
4242420207:130:1Direct peer
4242420207:140:<dn42_region>DN42 region ID we learned this route

Action communities

Attach these to routes you announce to RoutedBits to control how they're re-advertised. They're applied in order and can be combined.

CommunityEffect
65535:65281Well-known no-export (Do not advertise outside AS)
65535:65282Well-known no-advertise (Do not advertise anywhere)
65535:666Well-known blackhole community
4242420207:500:<1-4>Prepend AS 1-4 times when advertising to peers
4242420207:600:<dn42_region>Do not advertise to DN42 region

Region IDs

Used as the region parameter in region-scoped communities above.

IDRegionIDRegion
1Europe4Africa
2North America5Asia
3South America6Oceania

Setting communities

Add the large community to matching routes in your export filter. For example, to prepend twice to everyone and blackhole a single host:

export filter · examplelarge communities
# prepend AS4242420207 twice toward all peers
add-large-community(4242420207, 500, 2);

# blackhole a /32 you originate
if route matches 172.20.19.128/32 then
    add-large-community(4242420207, 666, 1);
Every session is filtered with strict ROA — routes that fail origin validation are dropped before communities are ever evaluated. See ROA & route filtering.