Tuesday, December 22, 2009

INE Vol 1 - Lab 16 - Multihop MP-eBGP for VPNv4 Exchange

Finally finished this lab, but experienced and oddity...

I saw the routes in the CE routers for the remote CE but wasn't able to ping. I even sourced my pings from a loopback that was being advertised in the CE-PE routing protocol. Weird.

Other than that, this was an interesting one, the 2 routers that join the 2 BGP ASes, were configured as eBGP peers and configured to send-label. Then the the eBGP VPNv4 relationship was farther spread apart, it was actually a peering of the PE to PE across 2 BGP ASes.

All in all, a good lab, but I'm troubled by why I can't seem to ping from CE to CE in either VRF.

On to the next one.

UPDATE------------ Issue resolved.
The problem was something so silly, I didn't have MPLS IP configured on R4, R5, and R6 in my ISIS domain. A good lesson, if your control plane looks good (ie your routing table) then the problem has to be in your forwarding plane. Thanks to Vignesh for his help.

Monday, December 14, 2009

INE Vol 1 - Lab 15 - finished - MP-BGP for Inter VRF

So it's taken awhile to finish this lab, mostly due to the my new role at work. I'm supporting production networks and troubleshooting issues and while it's interesting to some degree, it does take away from studying.

Anyhow, this lab was the same setup as the last one, back to back VRFs, but uses MP-BGP to leak routes between BGP domains. The thing to note on this lab is BGP automatically filters route-targets that it doesn't need to know of (meaning it doesn't have a link configured for). So in order to exchange VPN routes it needs to stop this filtering by...
'no bgp default route-target filter' under the BGP process. That way, it can know the VRF routes and leak them between it's MP-eBGP peer of the other network.

I'm afraid my progress will continue to slow, I hope once things settle down I'll be able to return more aggressively to my studies.