[c-nsp] OT: anyone with Brocade MLX experience that includes confederations?

[Pete Templin]

Somewhat off-topic, but at least the device in question speaks to a pair 
of Cisco ASRs: anyone have experience with Brocade MLX routers that 
happens to include BGP confederations? At $dayjob, I'm getting ready to 
unravel a confederation and go with good old-fashioned full-mesh IBGP 
(because WHY would you need three sub ASNs in a confederation when you 
have four routers???), and I don't have a great way to lab up an MLX, 
but I'd like to know if the tricks I learned years ago would work.

For the curious, my plan is to add the public ASN to the list of 
confederation peers (IOS and NXOS lets me do that) on all of the devices 
first, then move routers one-by-one to the public ASN natively (though 
interestingly they still need to be in the confederation). Once they're 
all in the public ASN and fully meshed, I circle back through and remove 
the confederation bits (which unfortunately seems to reset the BGP 
process on NXOS, but IOS can roll with it just fine). Doing it this way 
allows me to keep the whole ASN as one, rather than creating an EBGP 
arrangement between the two halves. I vaguely remember doing this 
process at $dayjob-3 about 12 years ago, and Riverstone code (yuck) 
wouldn't let me do this. Alas, I'd like to avoid that same kind of 
surprise/pain now.

Thanks all,

Pete