When you peer with lots of neighbors (as you should!) your bgp config in IOS is normally one of two things
Ok, so those are the opposite examples, but they don’t sit beyond the realms of possibility. I don’t like peer-groups because I don’t think they’re all that readable, and they are also not so scalable.
In steps the new way:peer templates. These are wonderful and allow you to put together a cascading peering policy for your routers. Templates support inheritance, so I can define in my router a global peering policy that I want every peer to have, and also a transit neighbor policy. Then you can define a template for each of your peered networks which inherits the global rules. Then the neighbor statement inherits the correct template for their AS.
In effect, you have global rules –> rules for a subset of networks –> rules for an AS –> a neighbor command.
To show the template system in action, this is what a peering session with the Cymru route-servers looks like using templates
router bgp 12345
template peer-session bogon-rs
remote-as 65333
description Peering with Team Cymru Bogons rs
password 7 094E176fakepassword271F
ebgp-multihop 255
exit-peer-session
!
no synchronization
bgp log-neighbor-changes
neighbor 194.109.21.101 inherit peer-session bogon-rs
neighbor 194.109.21.101 route-map CYMRUBOGONS in
neighbor 195.214.201.38 inherit peer-session bogon-rs
neighbor 195.214.201.38 route-map CYMRUBOGONS in
Global rules for the AS can be defined in just one place, so if I wanted to vary the max-prefix for an AS at every point where we meet, there is only one place to change the config. To use inheritance in the template peer-session section, use ‘inherit peer-session parent’ inside the ‘template peer-session’ section.
No more ugly, hard to read peer-groups.
I met some incredibly nice people from Joost last week, and met some different incredibly nice people from Network2.tv last month, so I decided I’d try both services and compare.
Drumroll please …… at the very early days, I think that Network2.tv is slightly better.
I can use my web-browser to watch network2, and start full screen video (where it exists, see the demo on the home page), which is ace – whereas with Joost I have to use their client. The Joost client is pretty funky, but shipping your own tools loses points on the ‘it just works’ front.
network2 doesn’t use p2p so I’m not using my bandwidth to send tv to people I don’t know. The full-screen video seemed less jerky on my 8Mbit DSL Max using network2 than it did on Joost (probably because it’s not using p2p!).
From a usability POV, Joost has a concept of channels which doesn’t seem right when not associated with a broadcast ‘many viewers, one stream’ system. Using RSS and web standards makes network2 make more sense when watching stuff on a computer.
I don’t actually want to watch tv that’s delivered over today’s consumer IP products. I don’t see whats wrong with broadcast being used, especially as you can tie broadcast into a PVR (like Sky+) inexpensively, and timeshift television around your life.