Through the Looking Glass: How to Brush Up on BGP

As someone who himself is looking for employment, I can't stress the importance of keeping your skill set sharp. Of course, unless you are working for a Tier-1 service provider, it may not be possible to keep skills such as BGP as sharp as they need to be for today's job market.

Fortunately, as is usually the case, there is a solution in looking-glass and route servers.

Just do a search for "looking-glass server" and you will come across sites such as traceroute.org, which will provide you with a list of servers to which you can connect.

For example, choosing the route server CerfNet Route Server (AS1838) will open a Terminal session on a Mac (on a PC, however, it will open whatever telnet program you are using). Once you click on the link to open the route server, Terminal (or your telnet program) will open with the following prompt:

route-server>

From this prompt, you can now begin to look at the BGP configuration of this device:

route-server>sho ip bgp summ
BGP router identifier 12.129.193.235, local AS number 1838
BGP table version is 1, main routing table version 1

Neighbor        V    AS MsgRcvd MsgSent   TblVer  InQ OutQ Up/Down  State/PfxRcd
12.129.192.1    4 17233       0       0        0    0    0 never    Active
12.129.192.2    4 17233       0       0        0    0    0 never    Active
134.24.13.2     4 64512 1287988 1287776        1    0    0 11w1d           0
134.24.13.3     4 64512 1287990 1287784        1    0    0 16w4d           0
route-server>

You can try different commands, either from the route servers or the looking glass servers and KEEP YOUR BGP SKILLS SHARP!