Re: Route Management Best Practices

[Mark Tinka <mtinka () globaltransit net>]

On Tuesday, January 31, 2012 03:04:15 PM Joe Marr wrote:

> What do you use for reflectors, hardware(Cisco/Juniper)
> or software daemons(Quagga)?

We operate 2x networks.

One of them runs Cisco 7201 routers as route reflectors, 
while the other runs Juniper M120 routers.

The large Juniper routers were due to particular BGP AFI's 
that Cisco IOS does not support (yet).

> I've been toying with the idea of using Quagga route
> servers to announce our prefixes to our edge routers and
> redistribute BGP annoucements learned from downstream
> customers.

You can certainly use any device in your network to 
originate your allocations. We just use the route reflectors 
because it is a natural fit, but you can use any device 
provided it would be as stable and independent as a route 
reflector.

The last thing you want is a blackhole or a route going away 
because your backhaul failed or your customer DoS'ed your 
edge router :-).

> Only drawback is the lack of support for
> tagged static routes, so it looks like I'm going to have
> to use a network statement w/ route-map to set the
> attributes.

There was a time when networks were ran without prefix 
lists, BGP communities or even route maps. I'm too young to 
have ever experienced those times, but I always joke with a 
friend (from those times) about how good we have it today, 
and how hard life must have been for Internet engineers of 
old :-).

If you have the opportunity, I'd advise against operating 
without these very useful tools.

> Has anyone tried this, or is it suicide?

I'm sure there are several networks out there that are 
intimidated by additional BGP features such as communities, 
advanced routing policy, e.t.c. They do survive without 
having to deal with this, probably because they're networks 
are small and the pain is better than trying something new. 
But I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone (except, as 
Randy would say, my competitors).

Mark.

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