Saturday, December 9, 2017

BGP configuration gotchas

I've taken over a small ISP with its own ASN and have taken it from being single-homed to multi-homed. I get what BGP is basically but missed a few important details for actually using it at the start.

One is that the "generic" case on our BGP software is actually IPv4 only and there is a completely separate section for IPv6 for almost every single setting. Based on what I've seen, I think this varies based on the router software and some explicitly call out IPv4 in their configuration.

Another is that changing a route-map requires explicitly issuing an outbound soft reset for it to take effect even though the router delays applying changes until they are explicitly committed. We aren't using Cisco, but the outbound soft reset came up in Cisco related documentation and I thought that was worth trying. I don't know if this is generally true to all routers.

Is the information about Cisco and BGP generally applicable enough that I should try some sort of Cisco course to pick up these sorts of details? Where else should I go to find out what I don't know about using BGP on a day to day basis?

If you have any personal tips to share that would also be appreciated.



No comments:

Post a Comment