When Kate Gerwig, my wonderful editor from SearchTelecom.com, and myself agreed on the contents of the “Building customer-resilient BGP networks” article, we had no idea that it would become extremely relevant just days before it was published. The article describes the tools a Service Provider should use to ensure that its customers cannot harm its BGP routing data (and consequently its other customers and the Internet at large).

On February 24th, someone in Pakistan decided to block local access to YouTube … and someone else decided that the best way to approach the problem was to block the whole world’s access to YouTube.

Rob van Ooijen has sent me a really interesting question:

I've configured a switch port to be unconditionally a trunk with the switchport mode trunk configuration command. However, when the interface was enabled, I've got a dynamic trap indicating the trunking was still dynamic (and the show commands also showed negotiation of trunking is enabled).

In fact, adjacent layer-2 devices can negotiate a number of things these days, among them:

Someone has sent me an interesting question a while ago: he's changed the configuration of a single VTY line and got three blocks of VTY configuration commands, similar to this:

line vty 0 2
 login
line vty 3
 password secret
 login
line vty 4
 login

He wanted to merge the three configuration blocks back into a single one but somehow didn't know how to do it.

One of the most tedious tasks in the initial lab setup (at least for me) is the IP address configuration, which usually includes a number of typos and mixups on the WAN links. You can simplify then WAN address configuration if you configure only one end of the WAN link and let PPP do the rest. For example, you could use the following configuration to configure WAN link on your core router …

Petr Lapukhov describes an interesting scenarion in his post BGP Time-Based Policy Routing: a multi-homed customer that uses one upstream link (for example, more reliable but slower one) during the work hours, switching to the other upstream link (faster, less reliable) after that.

He uses BGP communities to achieve the switch (perfect solution if your ISP supports them) and time-based ACL in a route-map to set the community based on time-of-day. As Cisco changed the way BGP imports local routes in IOS release 12.3T, he then devises an ingenious solution based on reliable static routing to trigger a change in the IP routing table.

The optimum solution is way simpler: you just configure two EEM applets to perform clear ip route network command at appropriate times.

I've finally found the EEM reference documentation that specifies the side effects (changes in environment variables) of all action commands. You can use the changed environment variables in subsequent action commands by prefixing the variable name with the $ sign (similar to the EEM applet where I've included router's name in an outgoing e-mail).

BGP implementation on Cisco IOS gives you a number of filtering options, including prefix filters, AS path filters and route maps. While it might be tempting to learn just the most versatile tool available (route maps) and discard all the others, judicious use of all available tools can simplify your router configurations.

For example, an Internet Service Provider might want to filter incoming updates received from the customers to ensure they’re not advertising transit routes and advertise only IP prefixes they actually own. Inbound route maps might also be needed to attach BGP communities to inbound routes or set BGP attributes (for example, local preference) based on communities attached to incoming routing updates.

One of my readers asked a very interesting question:

“Is there a way to have a port on a router open for legitimate use while closed to port scanning software and the such. For example. I have SSL VPN configured on my IOS router. Is it possible to have the port seem stealthed to port scanners while still allowing legitimate access to the service? An example being, allowing a web browser to connect using the port but making sure that a port scanner doesn't detect it as open.”

The short answer is no, unless you can differentiate legitimate users by their IP addresses. The port scanners (when using SYN scan) simply open and close a TCP session, and there is no way for a router to differentiate between the legitimate users (who would send valid HTTP GET requests) and port scanners (that would close the session as soon as it's established).

When IOS started supporting dynamic allocation of IPCP (IP over PPP) addresses, it also got the mechanism to insert a dynamic host route toward the neighbor's IP address once the IP addresses were negotiated. This mechanism makes perfect sense in dynamic address allocation environments, as the subnet mask is not negotiated with IPCP. Without a host route toward the other end of the PPP link, there would be no easy way to reach the IP prefixes reachable via the PPP link.

Sometimes it would be nice to have the full complement of Unix utilities available on Cisco IOS. That's not going to happen for a while, but we can use Tcl to make our life simpler in the meantime. Xavier Brouckaert, a regular contributor to my blog, has sent me the Tcl implementation of line counting utility (equivalent to wc -l on Unix).

First you have to define the wc Tcl procedure: