How to Adjust BGP Traffic & Prepare The System - Intro...

Howto: Adjust BGP Traffic & Prepare The System – Intro…

Posted on August 19th, 2009

In this SevenL tutorial, we will show you how to adjust BGP traffic.

What is the BGP?
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol used to exchange routing information across the Internet. It makes it possible for ISPs to connect to each other and for end-users to connect to more than one ISP. BGP is the only protocol that is designed to deal with a network of the Internet’s size, and the only protocol that can deal well with having multiple connections to unrelated routing domains.

BGP has proven to be scalable, stable and provides the mechanisms needed to support complex routing policies. When people talk about “BGP” today, they implicitly mean BGP4. There is no need to specify the 4 version number because no one uses earlier versions, and very few vendors even still support them.

You may hear some people call it as PBR, Policy Based Routing. That means the BGP is not as simple a routing protocol because the system administrator adjusted many policies. For example, to make a TCP session with neighbours, he has to configure his system manually.

I’m going to be writing articles base on the following:
– Single ISP, Single Line
– Single ISP, Dual Line
– Multiple ISPs, Single Router
– Multiple ISPs, Dual Routers
– BGP Filters

Before starting a BGP network setup, we need to first prepare our system.

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Preparing a System

We’re going to use Vyatta, VC5 VMWare Virtual Appliance on VMware Workstation 6. You may want to use a Cisco simulation software program. It’s really good to study and learn but if you want to set it up, you need to spend a small fortune on the Cisco Routers.

So instead lets play with Open Sources and test on VMWare. That way you can run BGP on a cheap routing server. There are a lot of open source implementations of BGP such as OpenBGPD, Quagga, Vyatta, etc.

Vyatta is really easy to manage, has lots of documentation and it is uses Juniper Interface Commands.

If you’re good at Cisco’s Interface, do not worry, they’re not too much different. Commands are commands; just focus on what the commands mean.

Let’s download it all first.

1. Download: VMWare Workstation and Vyatta, VC5 VMWare Virtual Appliance

– https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/index.php?p=workstation-w
(You need to register to download a 30-day free evaluation of VMware Workstation)

– http://www.vyatta.com/downloads/swdl.php