By default, the BGP hold timer is set to run every 180 seconds in Cisco IOS software. This timer value is set as the default to protect the BGP routing process from instability that can be caused by peering sessions with other routing protocols. BGP routers typically carry large routing tables, so frequent session resets are not desirable.

BGP fast peering session deactivation improves BGP convergence and response time to adjacency changes with BGP neighbors. This feature is event driven and configured on a per-neighbor basis. When this feature is enabled, BGP will monitor the peering session with the specified neighbor. Adjacency changes are detected and terminated peering sessions are deactivated in between the default or configured BGP scanning interval.

In Cisco IOS Release 12.4(4)T, 12.2(31)SB, 12.2(33)SRB, and later releases, the BGP Selective Address Tracking feature introduced the use of a route map with BGP fast session deactivation. The route-map keyword and map-name argument are used with the neighbor fall-over BGP neighbor session command to determine if a peering session with a BGP neighbor should be reset when a route to the BGP peer changes. The route map is evaluated against the new route, and if a deny statement is returned, the peer session is reset. The route map is not used for session establishment.

Note	Only match ip address and match source-protocol commands are supported in the route map. No set commands or other match commands are supported.

There is a configurable limit on the maximum number of prefixes that a router that is running BGP can receive from a peer router. This limit is configured with the neighbor maximum-prefix command. When the router receives too many prefixes from a peer router and the maximum-prefix limit is exceeded, the peering session is disabled or brought down. The session stays down until the network operator manually brings the session back up by entering the clear ip bgp command. Entering the clear ip bgp command clears stored prefixes.

In Cisco IOS Release 12.0(22)S, 12.2(15)T, 12.2(18)S, and later releases, the restart keyword was added to enhance the capabilities of the neighbor maximum-prefix command. This enhancement allows the network operator to configure a router to automatically reestablish a BGP neighbor peering session when the peering session has been disabled or brought down. There is configurable time interval at which peering can be reestablished automatically. The configurable timer argument for the restart keyword is specified in minutes. The time range is from 1 to 65,535 minutes.

Autonomous-system migration can be necessary when a telecommunications or Internet service provider purchases another network. It is desirable for the provider to be able to integrate the second autonomous system without disrupting existing customer peering arrangements. The amount of configuration required in the customer networks can make this a cumbersome task that is difficult to complete without disrupting service.

In Cisco IOS Release 12.0(29)S, 12.3(14)T, 12.2(33)SXH, and later releases, support was added for dual BGP autonomous system configuration to allow a secondary autonomous system to merge under a primary autonomous system, without disrupting customer peering sessions. The configuration of this feature is transparent to customer networks. Dual BGP autonomous system configuration allows a router to appear, to external peers, as a member of secondary autonomous system during the autonomous system migration. This feature allows the network operator to merge the autonomous systems and then later migrate customers to new configurations during normal service windows without disrupting existing peering arrangements.

The neighbor local-as command is used to customize the AS_PATH attribute by adding and removing autonomous system numbers for routes received from eBGP neighbors. This feature allows a router to appear to external peers as a member of another autonomous system for the purpose of autonomous system number migration. This feature simplifies this process of changing the autonomous system number in a BGP network by allowing the network operator to merge a secondary autonomous system into a primary autonomous system and then later update the customer configurations during normal service windows without disrupting existing peering arrangements.

Ingress Filtering During BGP Autonomous System Migration

Autonomous system path customization increases the possibility that routing loops can be created if such customization is misconfigured. The larger the number of customer peerings, the greater the risk. You can minimize this possibility by applying policies on the ingress interfaces to block the autonomous system number that is in transition or routes that have no local-as configuration.

Caution

BGP prepends the autonomous system number from each BGP network that a route traverses to maintain network reachability information and to prevent routing loops. This feature should be configured only for autonomous system migration and should be deconfigured after the transition has been completed. This procedure should be attempted only by an experienced network operator, as routing loops can be created with improper configuration.

The BGP Support for 4-Byte ASN feature introduced support for 4-byte autonomous system numbers. Because of increased demand for autonomous system numbers, in January 2009 the IANA will start to allocate 4-byte autonomous system numbers in the range from 65536 to 4294967295.

The Cisco implementation of 4-byte autonomous system numbers supports RFC 4893. RFC 4893 was developed to allow BGP to support a gradual transition from 2-byte autonomous system numbers to 4-byte autonomous system numbers. A new reserved (private) autonomous system number, 23456, was created by RFC 4893 and this number cannot be configured as an autonomous system number in the Cisco IOS CLI.

Migrating your BGP network to 4-byte autonomous system numbers requires some planning. If you are upgrading to an image that supports 4-byte autonomous system numbers, you can still use 2-byte autonomous system numbers. The show command output and regular expression match are not changed and remain in asplain (decimal value) format for 2-byte autonomous system numbers regardless of the format configured for 4-byte autonomous system numbers.

To ensure a smooth transition, we recommend that all BGP speakers within an autonomous system that is identified using a 4-byte autonomous system number be upgraded to support 4-byte autonomous system numbers.

For details about steps to perform to upgrade a BGP network to full 4-byte autonomous system support, see the Migration Guide for Explaining 4-Byte Autonomous System white paper.

When implemented for BGP, the TTL Security Check feature introduces a lightweight security mechanism to protect eBGP neighbor sessions from CPU utilization-based attacks. These types of attacks are typically brute force Denial of Service (DoS) attacks that attempt to disable the network by flooding the network with IP packets that contain forged source and destination IP addresses.

The TTL Security Check feature protects the eBGP neighbor session by comparing the value in the TTL field of received IP packets against a hop count that is configured locally for each eBGP neighbor session. If the value in the TTL field of the incoming IP packet is greater than or equal to the locally configured value, the IP packet is accepted and processed normally. If the TTL value in the IP packet is less than the locally configured value, the packet is silently discarded and no Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) message is generated. This is designed behavior; a response to a forged packet is unnecessary.

Although it is possible to forge the TTL field in an IP packet header, accurately forging the TTL count to match the TTL count from a trusted peer is impossible unless the network to which the trusted peer belongs has been compromised.

The TTL Security Check feature supports both directly connected neighbor sessions and multihop eBGP neighbor sessions. The BGP neighbor session is not affected by incoming packets that contain invalid TTL values. The BGP neighbor session will remain open, and the router will silently discard the invalid packet. The BGP session, however, can still expire if keepalive packets are not received before the session timer expires.

The BGP Support for TTL Security Check feature is configured with the neighbor ttl-security command in router configuration mode or address family configuration mode. When this feature is enabled, BGP will establish or maintain a session only if the TTL value in the IP packet header is equal to or greater than the TTL value configured for the peering session. Enabling this feature secures the eBGP session in the incoming direction only and has no effect on outgoing IP packets or the remote router. The hop-count argument is used to configure the maximum number of hops that separate the two peers. The TTL value is determined by the router from the configured hop count. The value for this argument is a number from 1 to 254.

The BGP Support for TTL Security Check feature supports both directly connected neighbor sessions and multihop neighbor sessions. When this feature is configured for a multihop neighbor session, the neighbor ebgp-multihop router configuration command cannot be configured and is not needed to establish the neighbor session. These commands are mutually exclusive, and only one command is required to establish a multihop neighbor session. If you attempt to configure both commands for the same peering session, an error message will be displayed in the console.

To configure this feature for an existing multihop session, you must first disable the existing neighbor session with the no neighbor ebgp-multihop command. The multihop neighbor session will be restored when you enable this feature with the neighbor ttl-security command.

This feature should be configured on each participating router. To maximize the effectiveness of this feature, the hop-count argument should be strictly configured to match the number of hops between the local and external network. However, you should also consider path variation when configuring this feature for a multihop neighbor session.

The BGP Support for TTL Security Check feature provides an effective and easy-to-deploy solution to protect eBGP neighbor sessions from CPU utilization-based attacks. When this feature is enabled, a host cannot attack a BGP session if the host is not a member of the local or remote BGP network or if the host is not directly connected to a network segment between the local and remote BGP networks. This solution greatly reduces the effectiveness of DoS attacks against a BGP autonomous system.

The IP protocol family was designed to use a wide variety of transmission links. The maximum IP packet length is 65000 bytes. Most transmission links enforce a smaller maximum packet length limit, called the maximum transmission unit (MTU), which varies with the type of the transmission link. The design of IP accommodates link packet length limits by allowing intermediate routers to fragment IP packets as necessary for their outgoing links. The final destination of an IP packet is responsible for reassembling its fragments as necessary.

All TCP sessions are bounded by a limit on the number of bytes that can be transported in a single packet, and this limit is known as the maximum segment size (MSS). TCP breaks up packets into chunks in a transmit queue before passing packets down to the IP layer. A smaller MSS may not be fragmented at an IP device along the path to the destination device, but smaller packets increase the amount of bandwidth needed to transport the packets. The maximum TCP packet length is determined by both the MTU of the outbound interface on the source device and the MSS announced by the destination device during the TCP setup process.

Path MTU discovery (PMTUD) was developed as a solution to the problem of finding the optimal TCP packet length. PMTUD is an optimization (detailed in RFC 1191) wherein a TCP connection attempts to send the longest packets that will not be fragmented along the path from source to destination. It does this by using a flag, don’t fragment (DF), in the IP packet. This flag is supposed to alter the behavior of an intermediate router that cannot send the packet across a link because it is too long. Normally the flag is off, and the router should fragment the packet and send the fragments. If a router tries to forward an IP datagram, with the DF bit set, to a link that has a lower MTU than the size of the packet, the router will drop the packet and return an ICMP Destination Unreachable message to the source of this IP datagram, with the code indicating "fragmentation needed and DF set." When the source device receives the ICMP message, it will lower the send MSS, and when TCP retransmits the segment, it will use the smaller segment size.

TCP path MTU discovery is enabled by default for all BGP neighbor sessions, but there are situations when you may want to disable TCP path MTU discovery for one or all BGP neighbor sessions. Although PMTUD works well for larger transmission links (for example, Packet over Sonet links), a badly configured TCP implementation or a firewall may slow or stop the TCP connections from forwarding any packets. In this type of situation, you may need to disable TCP path MTU discovery. In Cisco IOS Release 12.2(33)SRA, 12.2(31)SB, 12.2(33)SXH, 12.4(20)T, and later releases, configuration options were introduced to permit TCP path MTU discovery to be disabled, or subsequently reenabled, either for a single BGP neighbor session or for all BGP sessions. To disable the TCP path MTU discovery globally for all BGP neighbors, use the no bgp transport path-mtu-discovery command in router configuration mode. To disable the TCP path MTU discovery for a single neighbor, use the no neighbor transport path-mtu-discovery command in router or address family configuration modes. For more details, see the Disabling TCP Path MTU Discovery Globally for All BGP Sessions or the Disabling TCP Path MTU Discovery for a Single BGP Neighbor.

1.    enable

2.    configure terminal

3.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

4.    address-family ipv4 [mdt | multicast | tunnel | unicast [vrf vrf-name] | vrf vrf-name]

5.    neighbor ip-address remote-as autonomous-system-number

6.    neighbor ip-address fall-over

7.    end

Perform this task to configure selective address tracking for fast session deactivation. The optional route-map keyword and map-name argument of the neighbor fall-over command are used to determine if a peering session with a BGP neighbor should be deactivated (reset) when a route to the BGP peer changes. The route map is evaluated against the new route, and if a deny statement is returned, the peer session is reset.

Note	Only match ip address and match source-protocol commands are supported in the route map. No set commands or other match commands are supported.

1.    enable

2.    configure terminal

3.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

4.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} remote-as autonomous-system-number

5.    neighbor ip-address fall-over [route-map map-name]

6.    exit

7.    ip prefix-list list-name [seq seq-value ]{deny network / length | permit network / length}[ge ge-value] [le le-value]

8.    route-map map-name [permit | deny][sequence-number]

9.    match ip address prefix-list prefix-list-name [prefix-list-name...]

10.    end

• What to Do Next
  

Use the clear ip bgp command to resets a BGP connection using BGP soft reconfiguration. This command can be used to clear stored prefixes to prevent a router that is running BGP from exceeding the maximum-prefix limit. For more details about using BGP soft reconfiguration, see the "Monitoring and Maintaining Basic BGP" task in the "Configuring a Basic BGP Network" module.

Display of the following error messages can indicate an underlying problem that is causing the neighbor session to become disabled. The network operator should check the values that are configured for the maximum-prefix limit and the configuration of any peers that are sending an excessive number of prefixes. The following sample error messages are similar to the error messages that may be displayed:

00:01:14:%BGP-5-ADJCHANGE:neighbor 10.10.10.2 Up
00:01:14:%BGP-4-MAXPFX:No. of unicast prefix received from 10.10.10.2 reaches 5, max 6
00:01:14:%BGP-3-MAXPFXEXCEED:No.of unicast prefix received from 10.10.10.2:7 exceed limit6
00:01:14:%BGP-5-ADJCHANGE:neighbor 10.10.10.2 Down - BGP Notification sent
00:01:14:%BGP-3-NOTIFICATION:sent to neighbor 10.10.10.2 3/1 (update malformed) 0 byte

The bgp dampening command can be used to configure the dampening of a flapping route or interface when a peer is sending too many prefixes and causing network instability. Use this command only when troubleshooting or tuning a router that is sending an excessive number of prefixes. For more details about BGP route dampening, see the "Configuring Advanced BGP Features" module.

1.    enable

2.    show ip bgp neighbors [ip-address]

3.    configure terminal

4.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

5.    no bgp transport path-mtu-discovery

6.    end

7.    show ip bgp neighbors [ip-address]

Router# show ip bgp neighbors
BGP neighbor is 172.16.1.2,  remote AS 45000, internal link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 172.16.1.99
.
.
.
 For address family: IPv4 Unicast
  BGP table version 5, neighbor version 5/0
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 172.16.1.2
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 3; dropped 2
  Last reset 00:00:35, due to Router ID changed
  Transport(tcp) path-mtu-discovery is enabled
.
.
.
SRTT: 146 ms, RTTO: 1283 ms, RTV: 1137 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 8 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle, path mtu capable

Router# show ip bgp neighbors
BGP neighbor is 172.16.1.2,  remote AS 45000, internal link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 172.16.1.99
.
.
.
 For address family: IPv4 Unicast
  BGP table version 5, neighbor version 5/0
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 172.16.1.2
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 3; dropped 2
  Last reset 00:00:35, due to Router ID changed
.
.
.
SRTT: 146 ms, RTTO: 1283 ms, RTV: 1137 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 8 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle

1.    enable

2.    configure terminal

3.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

4.    address-family {ipv4 [mdt | multicast | unicast [vrf vrf-name] | vrf vrf-name] | vpnv4 [unicast]}

5.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} remote-as autonomous-system-number

6.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} activate

7.    no neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} transport{connection-mode | path-mtu-discovery}

8.    end

9.    show ip bgp neighbors

Router# show ip bgp neighbors
BGP neighbor is 172.16.1.1,  remote AS 45000, internal link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 172.17.1.99
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 172.16.1.1
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 1; dropped 0
  Last reset never
.
.
.
SRTT: 165 ms, RTTO: 1172 ms, RTV: 1007 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 20 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle
.
.
.
BGP neighbor is 192.168.2.2,  remote AS 50000, external link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 10.2.2.99
.
.
.
 For address family: IPv4 Unicast
  BGP table version 4, neighbor version 4/0
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 192.168.2.2
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 2; dropped 1
  Last reset 00:05:11, due to User reset
  Transport(tcp) path-mtu-discovery is enabled
.
.
.
SRTT: 210 ms, RTTO: 904 ms, RTV: 694 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 20 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle, path mtu capable

1.    enable

2.    configure terminal

3.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

4.    bgp transport path-mtu-discovery

5.    end

6.    show ip bgp neighbors

Router# show ip bgp neighbors
BGP neighbor is 172.16.1.2,  remote AS 45000, internal link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 172.16.1.99
.
.
.
 For address family: IPv4 Unicast
  BGP table version 5, neighbor version 5/0
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 172.16.1.2
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 3; dropped 2
  Last reset 00:00:35, due to Router ID changed
  Transport(tcp) path-mtu-discovery is enabled
.
.
.
SRTT: 146 ms, RTTO: 1283 ms, RTV: 1137 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 8 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle, path mtu capable

1.    enable

2.    configure terminal

3.    router bgp autonomous-system-number

4.    address-family {ipv4 [mdt | multicast | unicast [vrf vrf-name] | vrf vrf-name] | vpnv4 [unicast]}

5.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} remote-as autonomous-system-number

6.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} activate

7.    neighbor {ip-address| peer-group-name} transport{connection-mode | path-mtu-discovery}

8.    end

9.    show ip bgp neighbors [ip-address]

Router# show ip bgp neighbors 192.168.2.2
BGP neighbor is 192.168.2.2,  remote AS 50000, external link
  BGP version 4, remote router ID 10.2.2.99
.
.
.
 For address family: IPv4 Unicast
  BGP table version 4, neighbor version 4/0
.
.
.
  Address tracking is enabled, the RIB does have a route to 192.168.2.2
  Address tracking requires at least a /24 route to the peer
  Connections established 2; dropped 1
  Last reset 00:05:11, due to User reset
  Transport(tcp) path-mtu-discovery is enabled
.
.
.
SRTT: 210 ms, RTTO: 904 ms, RTV: 694 ms, KRTT: 0 ms
minRTT: 20 ms, maxRTT: 300 ms, ACK hold: 200 ms
Flags: higher precedence, retransmission timeout, nagle, path mtu capable