I decided to add “Further Reading” sections to BGP lab exercises, containing links to vendor documentation and useful related blog posts. I naively expected to offload the job to Claude, commit the results, and move on. Boy, was I wrong :(

TL&DR: I would love to get your suggestions for further reading as PRs in the BGP Labs repo.

The vendor documentation is “suboptimal” for what I wanted to do. Apart from FRRouting, it’s mostly generated from whatever internal system and uses auto-generated anchors that can change at any moment.

Also, a lot of times it starts with “and then there was this protocol called BGP,” goes into tons of details that are irrelevant when you want to configure (for example) a BGP neighbor, and gets to the neighbor command ~20 pages later. Great if you want to master BGP in one go, not so good if you believe in the “eating the elephant one bite at a time” approach.

The “related blog posts” were another disappointment. It seems Claude knows who’s paying for the subscription 😜, so it uses a lot of mine, but I never wrote CCNA/CCNP-level content, so there’s not much it can use. I did set a few somewhat strict rules on what’s acceptable, but I doubt there’s nothing out there explaining the basics of BGP without ads plastered all over the page.

I know most of you are well beyond the CCNA/CCNP stage of your career, but you might still have a few useful links stashed somewhere from those days. It would be great if you could add them to the relevant lab exercises (or, even simpler, open an issue saying “these links would be relevant for this exercise”).

Adding the links shouldn’t be too hard:

• Open any lab exercise on bgplabs.net
• Click the “View on GitHub” link in the left-hand sidebar
• Click on the “edit this file” button (the pencil in the right-hand corner just above the heading text).
• Make your changes
• Click the “commit changes” button and let GitHub guide you through the process of submitting a PR.

The labs are (as you know) free and open-source and will remain that way (no ads, no monetization, no enshittification), so the budget to motivate contributors is zero to 9 decimal places, apart from the warm and fuzzy feeling you might get, and a mention in the contributors list.

However, if we happen to meet in person, the first beer is on me ;)