The post describing my ideas about interactive online sessions resulted in a few comments and several off-line suggestions. Unfortunately most of the suggestions you’ve made in the comments are too generic. Remember, I was talking about 30-60 minute sessions and some suggestions would easily fill a week’s worth of training at the level of detail I’m aiming at. Running high-level introductory sessions is not my idea of fun; you could get as many of them as you want at Networkers.

Several suggestions are still “in the pipeline”: I have to envision how to structure them to make them manageable. In the meantime, the rest of the post lists the topics we can definitely cover. Please vote on them, the most popular one will be featured in December session.

Building a transit autonomous system with no BGP in the core

This idea came from the discussion in the CCIE Journey blog: how do I pass packets across a network that does not run BGP on every router (for example, from X1 to X2 in the following diagram). The solution in the CCIE Journey blog used GRE tunnels between edge routers, we’ll use MPLS.

Dynamic routing across a firewall

This topic started as a simple question: “How can I achieve dynamic failover to disaster recovery site if my security engineer refuses to configure dynamic routing on the firewall”. We’ll solve the problem in a simple network shown in the following diagram:

Reducing the size of the BGP table

Anyone who uses a hardware-based layer-3 switching device (which is almost any high-speed router these days) for a core router could be hit by this problem: as the number of routable prefixes in the Internet increases, you might run out of hardware lookup entries (TCAM, for example). How do you reduce the size of the IP routing table without losing too much flexibility? What are the drawbacks and the caveats?

BGP Autonomous System split

What happens if your BGP autonomous system splits in half due to a link failure? Can you patch it together? What are the caveats?