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BGP is an intimate friend for all service provider engineers. Without BGP there is no internet, there is no MPLS VPN and there are no many other things now and in the days to come. I believe its healthy to visit your friends from time to time and know how you live

Any BGP speaker receives routing updates from other peers, processes the information for local use and then advertise selected routes to different peers based on predefined policies. In order for BGP to be able to perform its functions it stores this information is a special type of database called the BGP  Routing Information Base.

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I am very glade to return back after pausing posting for a while. Actually we were very busy the last few months evaluating, designing and preparing for our company’s backbone migration, a little C Vs J with all its fun

Anyway, while going through the low level design we faced a little confusion when evaluating the MTU issues with MPLS running over. In the past we used to conduct the tests with Cisco’s IOS extended ping, but now we have IOS XR and JUNOS in addition, and we were hit by the fact of the difference in behavior. Digesting the details of the fundamentals always makes a difference.

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This question comes to my mind every time we are faced by choosing a new device for our network or whenever I read about hardware architecture of networking devices. However, when the time comes for  choosing routers for a large network migration I thought it will be wise to have a checklist or a model for comparing and evaluating the different options. I came out with the following list to start with, read it and let me know us your ideas.

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After introducing the Cisco  CRS-1 router in a previous post, We are going to delve more into the hardware architecture of this router. I believe we have to start by defining the main hardware components of the CRS-1 router and briefly describe their functions. In later posts we are going to study each part in more details. Now lets continue our baby steps.

Note: I will be focusing on single chassis configurations.

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“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Jimmy Wales.

All the great achievements in human history began as a simple idea in someone’s head. The above statment is no different. The above statement was nothing but the vision of Jimmy Wales the founder of wikipedia.

Over many years hundreds of volunteers have transformed this man’s vision into reality. Over the past eight years wikipedia has been there for you and for everyone of us. Today wikipedia needs you to operate, grow and to spread the benefits of this great achivement to many many upcoming generations.

Read this appeal from Jimmy Wales here and make a small donation to support wikipedia and if you are not able to make the donation yourself at least spread the word to those who can make it.

We have finished the physical installation of our CRS-1 routers this week, so I thought it would be nice to have some discussions about CRS-1, Juniper T-series and some general high end platform concepts. I believe this will be a series of posts, we can start with the CRS-1 overview.

The CRS-1 is a carrier class router as its name implies, it comes in 4, 8  and 16 slots chassis. The system can be configured as a single or multi-shelf system (Currently only 16 slots supports multi-shelf configuration).

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For those of you who are interested in obtaining some useful information about the BGP table (Internet routing table), check out the following websites for some useful reports, analysis and statistics. Nice resources for daily work, research and planning.

Play around:

BGP Routing Table Analysis Reports.

Check bgp4.as also for  a ton of tools and information about the BGP table.

Being in charge of choosing the right boxes for a service provider network is definitely a hard task specially if it is a large network migration and this is exactly what we were doing in the past few months. The challenge here is that your are faced with a lot of choices that will affect the future business of your company. You will need to see a little bit in the future and consider the traffic needs, the new features and technology trends in the few years to come.

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It has been about five moths now since I wrote my last post here. I am really sorry about that but we were too busy doing a lot of things which may provide a rich content for our posts on the next few months. Actually we were consumed preparing for exams, big backbone network migration and some other stuff. I believe we are going to share many of the lessons we learned from these experiences. I will keep you up to date, but now I have to go back and focus with the (DMT-IOS XR) course instructor.

Will be back soon.

In this post we are going to cover a nice tool, actually I’ve never used it in production, but I was fully testing it during my CCIE SP lab preparations and wish to share it with you. It’s nice to have such a tool in your tool box when dealing with complex designs.

The VRF Selection feature allows a certain interface on a PE router to route packets received from the CE router to different VRFs based on the source IP address of the packet, imagine it as a form of policy-based routing, where you control the traffic forwarding based on the source IP addresses, but in this case we control to which VRF should the traffic be forwarded rather than out of which interface.

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