What is a BGP Confederation?

Confederations By its true definition, a confederation is an organization which consists of a number of parties or groups united in an alliance or league. But what is a BGP confederation? BGP Confederation A BGP confederation is an alternative method to route reflectors, used to reduce the number of BGP peerings within a single AS. … Read more

Cisco – What is BGP ORF (Outbound Route Filtering)?

BGP ORF

What is ORF? Outbound Route Filtering (ORF) is a Cisco proprietary feature that prevents the unnecessary exchanging of routes that are subject to inbound filtering. This, in turn, minimizes bandwidth across the links and reduces CPU cycles upon the router during the processing of the neighbor UPDATE. ORF works by the router transmitting its inbound filters … Read more

What is the BGP Path Selection Process?

BGP Path Selection

BGP Path Selection Process BGP exchanges routes (prefixes) between BGP peers. Each of these announcements from a peer for a prefix is called a path. [1] The routes within these UPDATE messages are stored within the BGP Table and kept separate from the Routing Information Base (RIB). The BGP process then selects the “best” path from … Read more

Cisco IOS – BGP Soft Reconfiguration

Introduction When the BGP routing policy is amended the BGP neighbor session must be reset in order for the changes to take effect. Of course in a production environment performing a hard reset i.e clear ip bgp … ,  isn’t something that is recommended. Within this article, we will look at the various options available … Read more

BGP – Messages and Adjacency States

bgp-states-neighbor-adjacency 1

BGP Messages Within BGP (as per RFC 1771) there are four BGP message types. They are, OPEN – Used to open a BGP communication session between peers. This is the first message sent by each side once the 3WHS is complete, and can be thought of as a HELLO. Only once each side has confirmed … Read more

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