[j-nsp] Route Reflecting & Next-Hop Self

[Dan Armstrong]

I'm new to JunOS, coming from IOS - and I'm having a heck of a time 
wrapping my brain around something that should be fairly simple...


eg:

If I am a route-reflector server.  I also have eBGP sessions.  My ebgp 
session's next hop is in 'other people's' address space, so I don't 
carry it in my IGP, so I use next-hop self...  Seems fairly normal and 
common right?


In IOS, if I set next-hop self in a neighbor relationship with an 
RR-Client, it sets the next-hop to itself for routes learned from local 
eBGP sessions, but leaves the next-hop unchanged for routes that it's 
passing on from other fellow route-reflectors...

The *problem* is that in JunOS, if I set next-hop self on a neighbor 
relationship with an RR-Client, it sets the next-hop to itself all the 
time, even on routes it's passing on from other fellow route-reflectors, 
effectively sucking all traffic into the route reflector and totally 
defeating the purpose of route reflecting.

Now, of course we can policy-statement our way out of this - with big 
messy kludgey stuff, but it seems to me that there has to be a fairly 
simple and elegant way to do this, since it's pretty common, no?


(My current kludge is to set an import policy on my eBGP sessions that 
tag each route with a community called "HERE", have an export policy 
towards all my iBGP neighbors to set next-hop self if the route is 
tagged with the community "HERE", then strip it off - so that the 
community "HERE" never leaves any box.)