BGP Theory Flashcards
What is BGP?
Border Gateway Protocol - a non-proprietary path vector routing protocol.
What is a BGP Autonomous System?
A group of multiple public subnets.
What is meant by a well-known BGP attribute?
This means that it is an industry standard according to RFC 4271 and that all routers that run BGP will have these attributes.
What are the two well-known, discretionary BGP path attributes?
1.) Local Preference
2.) Atomic Aggregate
What are the three well-known, mandatory BGP path attributes?
1.) AS-Path
2.) Next-Hop
3.) Origin
What is meant by a BGP attribute that is transitive?
It means that the router will pass the attribute along to another router if received, even if that router does not support the attribute.
What is meant by a BGP attribute that is optional?
The attribute is not compliant with RFC 4271 industry standard.
What is an NLRI?
Network Layer Reachability Information - in BGP this is a routing update that contains the network prefix, prefix length, and BGP PAs for a given route.
Which PA is responsible for loop prevention?
AS-Path - it includes a complete list of all the ASNs that a prefix advertisement has traversed from its source AS.
What is MP-BGP?
Multiprotocol BGP - in RFC 2858, Address Families for IPv4, IPv6, Multicast, and Unicast were added making BGP “multi-protocol”.
NOTE that every protocol maintains its own database and configuration for each protocol in BGP, including unicast and multicast.
What characteristics make BGP unique?
- Does not use hello packets
- Uses TCP (source port 179) for inter-router communication
- Can form peering adjacencies across multiple hops (multiple networks away)
What makes up an iBGP session?
- Routers in the same AS or same BGP confederation
- Routes (prefixes) default Administrative Distance is 200
What makes up an eBGP session?
- Routers in different AS
- Routes (prefixes) default Administrative Distance is 20
What are four key differences between iBGP and eBGP sessions?
- eBGP TTL is set to “0” to prevent multi-hop adjacencies (iBGP is 255)
- eBGP advertising router modifies the BGP next-hop address to be the source router (iBGP cannot)
- eBGP advertising router prepends its AS number to the AS-Path attribute variable (iBGP does not)
- eBGP discards NLRIs that fail the AS-Path loop check
What types of simple messages do BGP routers send to each other?
Open, Update, Notification, Keepalive
What are the 6 progressive states of BGP peering?
Idle
Connect
Active
OpenSent
OpenConfirm
Established