[c-nsp] Non-default BGP hold / keepalive timers

[Bruce Pinsky]

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David J. Hughes wrote:
> I'm just looking for other peoples experiences with reducing the hold 
> down time of BGP peers to improve convergence time when a peer just 
> disappears on you.  As ethernet delivered services are becoming more 
> popular the chance of having end-to-end link with the actual peer 
> device is getting smaller.  If the peer dies, blackholing traffic for 
> the default 180 seconds just isn't good enough.
> 

Start talking to your providers and peers about when they are going to
offer BFD support.  This will be the preferred method since using layer 3
routing protocols as a fault detection tool has significant drawbacks.

> What are people running on their eBGP borders?  I've read of some very 
> aggressive timer use for iBGP sessions (i.e. running 3 * 1 second 
> keepalives) but I wouldn't run that internally, let alone with an 
> external peer.  I can't find any BCP or similar that covers this.  I 
> don't really want to start tweaking them lower an lower until things 
> start to flap.
> 
> I am thinking about 3 * 5 seconds giving a 15 second outage in this 
> situation.  Thoughts?
> 

I don't know that many providers are willing to tune the BGP timers on a
per customer basis at all.  YMMV.

- --
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bep

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