After yesterday's final yearly IPv4 address report, I thought that today, I'd look at the other numbers the five Regional Internet Registries give out: IPv6 addresses and autonomous system (AS) numbers.
Read the article - posted 2015-01-09
As part of my BGP training course, I explain to the participants that they can get BGP either by buying a router from the likes of Cisco or Juniper, or by running routing software such as Zebra, Quagga or OpenBGPD on a Unix (-like) operating system. Then I always mention that I haven't tried OpenBGPD yet, but I really should.
There's no time like the present, so I decided to take the plunge today.
Yesterday, I talked about my first experience with OpenBGPD. Which of course raised the question: why not use BIRD instead? It's a lot more mature. So I gave it a try.
Over the weekend, I wrote posts about trying out OpenBGPD and BIRD.
Here's a bunch more information about these two and other open source routing software...
Read the article - posted 2015-02-02
This text used to be on the BGPexpert.com home page, but Cisco now includes "no syncronization" in the default configuration, so it's unlikely anyone is still going to run into trouble because of this, so I've moved this to a separate page out of the way.
When you run BGP on two or more routers, you need to configure internal BGP (iBGP) between all of them. If those routers are Cisco routers, they won't work very well unless you configure them with no synchronization.
Read the article - posted 2015-02-04
As you may have noticed, I write about BGP from time to time. When coming up with example configurations, there's always the challenge of which AS numbers and IP addresses/prefixes to use...
Read the article - posted 2015-04-24
For some years now, the Regional Internet Registries have been rolling out RPKI. The Resource Public Key Infrastructure allows holders of IP addresses to authorize an autonomous system to inject those addresses in BGP. (See here for an overview of how RPKI works and more links.)
I've always thought it would be hard to deploy RPKI in the real world, because it's just way too easy for a certificate or ROA (route origination authorization) to expire. If that then leads to routes becoming invalid and the addresses in question being unreachable, that would be a good example of the cure being worse than the disease.
Fortunately, that's not the case: RPKI is ready for real-world deployment today.
Read the article - posted 2015-04-30
Earlier this month, RIPE Labs had a lengthy blog post about transfers of IPv4 addresses within the RIPE region. A lot of addresses went from Romania to Saudi Arabia, but the rest of Europe and the Middle East has been busy, too. However:
In the subsequent months of January 2015 through to April 2015, levels of transfer were significantly lower. Because the RIPE NCC listing service continues to show strong demand, the lower amounts transferred may well be a sign that the market in the RIPE region is capped by availability; total demand cannot be met by available supplies. This may change after the recently accepted RIPE policy for inter-RIR transfers has been implemented.
It probably wasn't an accident that two of the sponsors of the RIPE-70 meeting were businesses that facilitate IPv4 address trading.
Read the article - posted 2015-05-28
This July 30th, at 23:59:60, a leap second was added to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Dyn Research posted the following graph on Twitter that shows there was significant BGP update instability for five minutes after the leap second occurred:
20 years ago today, I got my first autonomous system (AS) number, marking my entry in the BGP business. (5399, if you're wondering.)
To quote Ferris Bueller: "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." So let's look back and see what has happened over those 20 years.
Read the article - posted 2015-08-15
You've been seeing the Noction banners on this site for a while now. Maybe you're still wondering what their Intelligent Routing Platform is all about. In that case, you may want to have a look at RouterFreak's review of the IRP.
Read the article - posted 2015-09-22
If you liked (or missed) last month's post where I talk about 20 years of BGP, you may be interested in this story for the RouterFreak site that covers the history of inter-domain routing all the way from the GGP protocol in the early 1980s to the present.
Read the article - posted 2015-09-24