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BGP Soft Reconfiguration

The document discusses BGP soft reconfiguration, which allows updating BGP policies without resetting the BGP session. It describes hard resets, dynamic soft resets using route refresh, and soft resets using pre-stored neighbor information. It provides an example configuration of soft resets on two routers to demonstrate updating BGP policies and viewing the different routing tables.

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Son Tran Hong Nam
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78 views

BGP Soft Reconfiguration

The document discusses BGP soft reconfiguration, which allows updating BGP policies without resetting the BGP session. It describes hard resets, dynamic soft resets using route refresh, and soft resets using pre-stored neighbor information. It provides an example configuration of soft resets on two routers to demonstrate updating BGP policies and viewing the different routing tables.

Uploaded by

Son Tran Hong Nam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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BGP Soft Reconfiguration

When we change the BGP routing policy (changing the attributes or adding
filters) we need to reset the BGP session before the new policy takes effect.
This is no problem in a lab but its something you dont want to do in a
production network. In fact, there are 3 methods how you can refresh your
BGP policies:

Hard reset

Dynamic Soft Reset (route refresh)

Soft reset with pre-stored information

The hard reset is the most simple method (clear ip bgp command). It kills
the TCP session with your BGP neighbor which forces it to restart and as a
result youll receive all prefixes from your neighbor again. It works, but its
cruel
Dynamic soft reset is the most preferred method, it requires the route
refresh capability. Simply said, this feature lets your router request its BGP
neighbor to send its prefixes again.
Routers that dont support the route refresh capability will have to use the
soft reset option. Thats what this tutorial is about. You can read about
dynamic soft reset / route refresh in my other tutorial.
Normally I talk about prefixes or routes but technically the information that BGP
exchanges in update messages is called NLRI (Network Layer Reachability
Information). The NLRI field contains the prefixes and length.

The soft reset option uses pre-stored information. Basically when we


receive prefixes from a BGP neighbor we will store this information in a new
table and we dont make any changes to it. Our router will then apply its
inbound BGP policy to this table and stores the end result as the BGP table.
Since you are now storing another table for each neighbor instead of one
BGP table you will have some overhead, your router will require more
memory. This is especially true when you enable soft reset for all your BGP
neighborskeep this in mind before you configure this.
The tables that Im talking about have some special names, let me show you
a picture and explain this a bit more:

On the left side we see a table called adj-RIB-in. This is the unedited routing
information from a BGP neighbor. Theres a seperate table for each BGP
neighbor that you peer with. We apply our inbound BGP policy to this
information and the result is a table called the adj-RIB-in, this is the actual
BGP table.
BGP will select the best path from the BGP table and the router will install
this in the routing table. Also, the best paths can be advertised to other BGP
neighbors. We can apply an outbound BGP policy to outbound updates and
when this is done we have a table called adj-RIB-out (per neighbor). The
adj-RIB-in table is actually stored in memory for each neighbor, the adj-RIBout table not.
Now you have an idea about the different tables and how soft reconfiguration
works, lets take a look at this on some BGP routers.

Configuration
To demonstrate the soft reset we only need two routers. R1 has two loopback
interfaces so that we have a couple of networks to advertise:

First we will configure BGP between the two routers:


R1(config)#router bgp 1
R1(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.2 remote-as 2
R1(config-router)#network 1.1.1.1 mask 255.255.255.255
R1(config-router)#network 11.11.11.11 mask 255.255.255.255
R2(config)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 remote-as 1

Nothing special here, we run EBGP and R1 advertises its two loopback
interfaces. By default the soft reset option is disabled, lets configure it on
R2:
R2(config)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 soft-reconfiguration inbound

The soft-reconfiguration inbound command tells R2 to save the routing


information from R1 unmodified in the adj-RIB-in table. It will then apply the
inbound BGP policy and store the information in the BGP table.
Lets take a look at these tables, a good way to do this is by changing some
of the BGP attributes. Ill change the local preference for the prefixes we
receive from R1:
R2(config)#route-map LOCALPREF permit 10
R2(config-route-map)#set local-preference 200
R2(config-route-map)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 route-map LOCALPREF in

This will set the local preference to 200 for all incoming prefixes from R1.
Instead of clearing the TCP session, well do a soft reset:
R2#clear ip bgp 192.168.12.1 soft in

Use the soft in parameter to do a soft reset. Now look at the BGP table first:
R2#show ip bgp
BGP table version is 3, local router ID is 192.168.12.2
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i - internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale, m multipath, b backup-path, x best-external, f RT-Filter
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete
Network
Next Hop
Metric LocPrf Weight Path
*> 1.1.1.1/32
192.168.12.1
0 200
01i
*> 11.11.11.11/32 192.168.12.1
0 200
01i

The BGP table (loc-RIB) was modified as expected, now take a look at the
adj-RIB-in table:
R2#show ip bgp neighbors 192.168.12.1 received-routes
BGP table version is 3, local router ID is 192.168.12.2
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i - internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale, m multipath, b backup-path, x best-external, f RT-Filter
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete
Network
Next Hop
Metric LocPrf Weight Path
* 1.1.1.1/32
192.168.12.1
0
01i
* 11.11.11.11/32 192.168.12.1
0
01i
Total number of prefixes 2

Above you see the raw routing information from R1 before we applied the
inbound BGP policy. You can see that no changes were made to the local
preference of my prefixes.
Another nice experiment is to filter some of the prefixes:
R2(config)#access-list 1 permit host 1.1.1.1
R2(config)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 distribute-list 1 in

Ill use a distribute-list so that 11.11.11.11 /32 is not allowed anymore.


Before I do another soft reset Ill enable a debug, this allows you to see what
the router is doing with the BGP updates:

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