Description

The customer performed a policy change which led to BGP updates being received as malformed packets on the neighbor device with below logs being seen. 

%BGP-3-MALFORMED_ATTR: Malformed AS_PATH attribute received from 192.168.1.2

%BGP-4-BAD_UPDATE: Invalid or corrupted update received from neighbor 192.168.1.2, ASN 65001 

Symptoms

On customer device, customer made  configuration changes  on specific routes where they added community value with AS_PREPEND when the neighbour device started reporting malformed BGP update packets on there log messages and routes were not being advertised.

 

 

show route advertising-protocol bgp 192.168.1.1 table inet.3 | match 65001

Nov 26 10:13:12

* 10.1.1.1/32        Self                                    1 [65001] 100 I

* 10.1.1.2/32        Self                                    1 [65001] 100 I

* 10.1.1.3/32        Self                                    1 [65001] 100 I

* 10.1.1.4/32        Self                                    1 [65001] 100 I

Solution

From the above output, the AS_PREPEND policy was incorrectly configured by the customer.

 

Incorrect Configuration :

 

show policy-options policy-statement AS_PATH_PREPEND

term 10 {

    from {

        protocol bgp;

        prefix-list MY_ROUTES;

    }

    then {

        as-path-prepend "1 65001 100";

        accept;

    }

}

 

Correct Configuration:

 

show policy-options policy-statement AS_PATH_PREPEND

term 10 {

    from {

        protocol bgp;

        prefix-list MY_ROUTES;

    }

    then {

        as-path-prepend "65001 65001";

        accept;

    }

}

 

After rectifying the configuration the updates were proper and no further malformed packets were being reported .  

Modification History

2024-11-27 : Article Created