dare i say it... bgp...

the time has come... i've been putting it off because it's been my belief that things come to me in their time, and when i'm ready... let's hope...

so bgp... begin at the beginning...a former colleague of mine referred to it as static on steroids... i like that... let's see if his reference holds up...

a step back...
why i waited... i never dug into the ccnp syllabus until i passed ccna... that was a policy i always held... i've said it before, one needs to earn it... those who skip to chapter 48 get what they deserve... so too with bgp...

when i first began to learn ios it was on routers only, which left me weak at layer 2...  before i passed ccna i bought equipment because although gns3 is phenomenal, it's little help with switching, and that's where i needed the work...
switch for me will never be done, just like the rest of this madness, it simply goes on and on...  the more you know, the more you don't, which hysterically makes sense to me... (hysterical, not in the laughter sense)

onto route... i promised i wouldn't skip past eigrp and ospf just to get to bgp simply because i knew little about it... i kept that promise... and like switch, i will never be done with either of those...

here i am...

bgp does not require neighbors to be in the same subnet...

that's prettty big of bgp right there...

bgp uses tcp on port 179 to pass neighbor messages...

bgp uses path attributes for best path selection... this is more complex than the integer metrics that igp's use...

its advertised prefix/length is known as nlri, or network layer reachability information

it's emphasis is on scalability which may cause it to NOT choose the best route

it uses path vector logic which is similar to dv logic

we can relax now...