Verify BGP Peers
Purpose
Assuming that all the routers are correctly configured for BGP, you can verify if IBGP and EBGP sessions are properly established, external routes are advertised and received correctly, and the BGP path selection process is working properly.
Figure 1 illustrates an example BGP network topology used in this topic.
Figure 1: BGP Network Topology
The network consists of two directly connected ASs consisting of external and internal peers. The external peers are directly connected through a shared interface and are running EBGP. The internal peers are connected through their loopback (lo0) interfaces through IBGP. AS 65001 is running OSPF and AS 65002 is running IS-IS as its underlying IGP. IBGP routers do not have to be directly connected, the underlying IGP allows neighbors to reach one another.
The two routers in AS 65001 each contain one EBGP link to AS 65002 (R2 and R4) over which they announce aggregated prefixes: 100.100.1.0, 100.100.2.0, 100.100.3.0, and 100.100.4.0. Also, R1 and R5 are injecting multiple exit discriminator (MED) values of 5 and 10, respectively, for some routes.
The internal routers in both ASs are using a full mesh IBGP topology. A full mesh is required because the networks are not using confederations or route reflectors, so any routes learned through IBGP are not distributed to other internal neighbors. For example, when R3 learns a route from R2, R3 does not distribute that route to R6 because the route is learned through IBGP, so R6 must have a direct BGP connection to R2 to learn the route.
In a full mesh topology, only the border router receiving external BGP information distributes that information to other routers within its AS. The receiving router does not redistribute that information to other IBGP routers in its own AS.
From the point of view of AS 65002, the following sessions should be up:
- The four routers in AS 65002 should have IBGP sessions established with each other.
- R2 should have an EBGP session established with R1.
- R4 should have an EBGP session established with R5.
To verify BGP peers, follow these steps:
