Blog

BGP communities tag routes with meaning: customer route, prefer this path, do not advertise outside our region. A complete guide to standard, extended, and large BGP communities with practical policy examples.

Route maps are the primary BGP traffic engineering tool on Cisco IOS XE. Match on AS-path, community, or MED, then set attributes to steer paths. A practical guide to matching, setting, and manipulating BGP routes.

RPKI lets prefix owners sign ROAs that say which AS is authorized to originate their prefixes. Route Origin Validation rejects invalid routes. A practical guide to RPKI and ROV on Cisco IOS XE for internet-facing networks.

BGP was designed when every AS was trusted. Accidental route leaks and deliberate prefix hijacks have caused repeated major outages. How to detect them, prevent them, and protect your AS from the blast radius when others make mistakes.

Default BGP convergence can take 3 minutes to notice a dead peer. That is fine on the public internet and unacceptable in enterprise or data center BGP. Every knob for reducing BGP failover time on Cisco IOS XE, including BFD.

You set local-pref, route maps, and communities, and traffic still goes the wrong way. BGP is deterministic; a surprise path means either policy is not applied where you think, or a higher priority step decided first.