Wednesday, March 20, 2013

eBGP connection issues

eBGP connections differ form iBGP connections in the way router with TTL value inside the IP packet. By default, BGP sends packets with TTL value set to 255 to it's iBGP peers, so if we are connecting to the loopback interface (or other IP addresses that are more than 1 hop away) everything works well out of the box. This is not the case for the eBGP peers. In order to connect to loopback interface of eBGP peer, we have to configure "neighbor x.x.x.x ebgp-multihop 'TTL value'" router command, because by default BGP sends packets with IP TTL set to 1! If you forgot to do this this, "show ip bgp summary" will show the neighbor connection sitting in IDLE state!