Folks,

Just to let you know, I ran across what looked like a bug in Cisco's
BGP code...  Turns out, this is undocumented new behavior.

We just deployed a pair of 3640s for one of our customers, for
dual-router, dual-homed Internet connectivity.  We are taking full
tables from Genuity (AS 1), and Worldcom (AS 701).

Each router was learning 104,000+ prefixes from each of the external
peers, but the iBGP peering was acting really strange.  One of the
routers was learning the full table from the other, but the second
router was only taking like 700 prefixes.

When we cleared the internal peer (soft or hard), we could see the
whole table being transferred...  It would climb as though it were
going to learn them all, and then as it approached 100,000 prefixes,
it would rapidly drop back down to 700.  I debugged the iBGP peer, and
saw it issuing withdrawls for all of these routes.

We opened a ticket with the TAC, and they initially believed it to be
a bug as well.  Upon further review, they came back and told us that
this was the desired behavior in the newer code (We are running
12.0(20) on these boxes).  In order to conserve memory, and processor,
if an iBGP peer learns that another iBGP peer already has a better
route to a specific prefix,  it will issue a withdrawl to that peer
for the prefix(es).

I spent quite a while second guessing what seemed to be a very simple,
straighforward configuration.  I have done several near identical
deployments in the past.

I guess the moral is this:  If you know your config is correct, and
the router behavior is not what you expect, do not hesitate to call
the TAC.

I hope they are as helpful on Monday, when I call them from the CCIE
Lab in RTP.  ;)

Regards...

Alan




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