Configuring BGP

I spent most of my early afternoon configuring BGP for the first time. I was honestly a little nervous about if I was going to get this protocol up and running because I hear so many stories about how in-depth this particular protocol was. It actually took me a little while to get my lab up and working with this protocol because I wasn't sure if i needed to synchronize my BGP routes with my IGP (EIGRP) or not. I ended up using loopback interfaces as my update sources and configured my AS 65101 as a full-mesh BGP even though I' sure I didn't need to in retrospect since the AS wasn't a transitive AS.

Transitive AS's pass on BGP routes from one AS to another AS, in other words it's like a middle-man in the BGP routing process. I also had problems with my network statements, at first I didn't realize you even needed to use network statements since you were using the neighbor commands. Even after using network commands my BGP routes still wouldn't propagate to each other. After a little research i decided to define the specific subnets that I wanted to be used for routing updates. As soon as I did that all the routes came right up!