This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast.

As we all know, BGP runs the networked world. It is a protocol that has existed and operated in the vast expanse of the internet in one form or another since early 1990s, and despite the fact that it has been extended, enhanced, twisted, and warped into performing a myriad of tasks that one would never have imagined in the silver era of internetworking, it has remained largely unchanged in its operational core.

The world as we know it would never exist without BGP, and because of the fact that it is such a widely deployed protocol with such a solid track record of “just working”, the transition to a better security model surrounding it has been extraordinarily slow to modernize.

Tweaking, tuning, adjusting and traffic engineering with BGP is easy to get started in and very difficult to master. Because of that, the cleanliness of the default free zone, or “DFZ” as it is called, can be …let’s say… questionable. There are projects such as MANRS that aim to solve that, and there are mechanisms such as BGP RPKI intent on securing the resources critical to the functioning of the DFZ.

In the Episode 112 of Software Gone Wild, we sat down with Kevin Myers and Lindsay Hill - two seasoned ISP engineers - to wander the less traveled path of hardcore routing in the local internet space. As an informal extension of the Surviving in the Internet Default Free Zone webinar, we explored some of the finer details of traffic manipulation, hijacks, filtering, and best practices. The BGP journey took us down a the path of tools, war stories, and of course, the polarizing topic of BGP optimizers.