Do you have a good reason to use BGP aggregation?
For the last 10 years, I've been preaching that you should use static BGP prefix advertising (with the network mask router configuration command) to advertise your IP address space into the public Internet, not the BGP aggregation. I might see some use for BGP aggregation in enterprise networks (or MPLS VPN networks) using BGP as the core routing protocol with other routing protocols serving the edge, but I cannot find a good scenario where BGP aggregation in public Internet would be a good solution. Do you use BGP aggregation in your network? Do you have a good scenario that you'd like to share with us? Write a comment.
1) BGP will advertise the aggregate only when it has component routes. this means that it will advertise the aggregate until his last component route is lost. the component routes can also be specificaly defined with the "advertise-map" keyword. All of these make it a really helpful feature in many cases - i can mention a few if you would like...
2) It provides an easy way of suppressing prefixes
3)Its inheritance capabilites (aggregate from its commponents) can also be quite helpful. mainly, the way you can control this inheritance.
another idea is to set the next hop of the route to an address that route to Null in all the network so address that is not in use will be discard in the edge of the network and will not get to the route originator.
Nitzan
the guy is asking to share our opinion with him. The quotes that you show - You can be sure that he knows that (Or even possible is that you quote his publications :))
Anyway, in my opinion I've never used this feature for my humble experience period (~7 years). I'm working in a service provider and most of our customers have PI addresses. Other just using network command because they've never heard about aggregation feature. Anyway I found it as a good feature which nobody use (because everyone use network statement instead) Just like ORF (Outbound Route Filtering) - nobody use it everyone is prefer to use Prefix-list in conjunction with route-maps.
Kind Regards,
Danail Petrov
I am not quoting anyone but myself (if i would, i would give reference).I just pointed out aspects of BGP aggregate that i think are providing an added value.
as for a simple example:
Let's say we have 2 routers. one (R1) located at the HQ , and the other (R2) located in a DRP site a couple of miles away.
The two sites (Main and DRP) are connected directly (not through the internet!), and are running IBGP.
normally, traffic should flow only over the Main site's link to the ISP (i am refering only to inbound traffic), so we will advertise the more specidic routes there.
We got 4 C Classes from the ISP (PI).
configuring 4 "nework" statements (for each C Class network) at the main site , and "aggregate-address X.X.X.X 255.255.252.0" at the DRP site would be an easy way of implementing this requierment.
of course, you could configure a static route to null0 and advertise it using a "network" statement, but then you will have to filter the more specific routes. anyway, (as far as i can think of) BGP aggregate will be much more elegant.