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Table of Contents
CCIE Routing & Switching

Unit 1: Preparation
Unit 2: Switching
Unit 3: IP Routing
Unit 4: RIP
Unit 5: EIGRP
Unit 6: OSPF
Unit 7: BGP
Introduction to BGP

eBGP (External BGP)

eBGP Multi-Hop

iBGP (Internal BGP)

How to read the BGP Table

How to advertise networks in BGP

iBGP Next Hop Self

BGP Auto-Summary

BGP Neighbor Adjacency States

BGP Messages

BGP Weight Attribute

BGP Local Preference

BGP AS Path and Prepending

BGP Origin Code

BGP MED (Metric) Attribute

BGP Communities

BGP Community No Advertise

BGP Community No Export

BGP Community Local AS

BGP Regular Expressions

BGP ltering with regular expressions

BGP Allow AS in

BGP AS Override

BGP IPv6 route ltering

BGP Transit AS
 BGP Route Re ector

BGP Confederations

BGP Synchronization

BGP Backdoor Routes

BGP Peer Groups

MP-BGP (Multi-Protocol BGP)

BGP Private and Public AS Numbers

BGP Remove Private AS Numbers

BGP Soft Recon guration

BGP Route Refresh Capability

BGP Extended Access-List Filtering

Unit 8: Multicast
Unit 9: IPv6
Unit 10: Quality of Service
Unit 11: Security
Unit 12: System Management
Unit 13: Network Services
Unit 14: MPLS

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BGP Route Refresh Capability

8 votes

A long time ago there was no method to dynamically request a re-advertisement of the pre xes of
one of your BGP neighbors. When you change your policy, somehow you have to compare all the
pre xes from your BGP neighbor against your new policy.

To solve this problem, the soft recon guration method was created which stores an unmodi ed
version of the pre xes from your BGP neighbor. This works but you’ll need additional memory
since you are saving an additional table for each BGP neighbor. Since 2000 we also have the route
refresh capability, simply said…your router will ask its BGP neighbor to re-send its pre xes.

Here are the 3 options that we have to refresh our BGP table when our policy changes:

Hard reset
Soft recon guration
Route refresh capability

The hard reset is the most simple method (clear ip bgp command). It kills the TCP session with your
BGP neighbor which forces it to restart and as a result you’ll receive all pre xes from your neighbor
again. It works but will interrupt your network, not a good idea.

The soft recon guration will store everything that you receive from a BGP neighbor in a separate
table before applying the policy. I explain this in my soft recon guration tutorial. This works but it’s
not very e cient. Your router will store an entire table for each BGP neighbor with the unmodi ed
pre xes, you’ll need extra memory.

Route refresh capability is the most preferred method…when you change your BGP policy you
just send a message to your BGP neighbor and it will re-send you all its pre xes, there will be no
disruption at all.

In this tutorial we’ll look at the route refresh capability, it’s described in RFC 2918 and supported on
most routers.

Configuration
I will use two routers for this, R1 and R2. I have added two loopback interfaces on R1 so that we
have something to advertise:

Let’s start with a default BGP con guration:

R1(config)#router bgp 1
R1(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.2 remote-as 2
R1(config-router)#network 1.1.1.1 mask 255.255.255.255
R1(config-router)#network 11.11.11.11 mask 255.255.255.255

R2(config)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 remote-as 1

Route refresh is enabled by default, you can verify this by using the following show command:

R1#show ip bgp neighbors 192.168.12.2 | begin capabilities

Neighbor capabilities:
Route refresh: advertised and received(new)

This router can do a route refresh for inbound pre xes (what you learn from you BGP neighbor) or
outbound (the pre xes that you send to them). On my IOS 15.x router you see “(new)” which means
this router supports the RFC 2918 version of route refresh. Some older IOS versions might show
(“old & new”) which means they also support a version of route refresh that Cisco implemented
before the RFC was created.
Let’s see if R2 learned those pre xes on the loopback interfaces:

R2#show ip bgp
BGP table version is 3, local router ID is 192.168.12.2
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i -
internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale, m multipath, b backup-path, x best-
external, f RT-Filter
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete

Network Next Hop Metric LocPrf Weight Path

*> 1.1.1.1/32 192.168.12.1 0 0 1 i
*> 11.11.11.11/32 192.168.12.1 0 0 1 i

That’s looking good. Now I will create a route-map that changes one of the BGP attributes. This
means the router will have to update its BGP table somehow:

R2(config)#route-map METRIC permit 10

R2(config-route-map)#set metric 222

R2(config)#router bgp 2
R2(config-router)#neighbor 192.168.12.1 route-map METRIC in

This route-map will set the metric to 222 for all pre xes that we receive from R1. Let’s look at he
BGP table again:

R2#show ip bgp
BGP table version is 3, local router ID is 192.168.12.2
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i -
internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale, m multipath, b backup-path, x best-
external, f RT-Filter
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete

Network Next Hop Metric LocPrf Weight Path

*> 1.1.1.1/32 192.168.12.1 0 0 1 i
*> 11.11.11.11/32 192.168.12.1 0 0 1 i

As you can see nothing has changed yet. We’ll use the route refresh method to x this but before I
do so, let’s enable a debug so you can see in realtime what is going on:

R1 & R2#debug ip bgp

BGP debugging is on for address family: IPv4 Unicast

I’ll enable the debug on both routers, now we can do a reset:

 R2#clear ip bgp 192.168.12.1 ?
all All address families
flap-statistics Clear flap statistic
in Soft reconfig inbound updates
ipv4 Address family
ipv6 Address family
l2vpn Address family
nsap Address family
out Soft reconfig outbound updates
rtfilter Address family
slow Forcefully clear slow-peer status and move it to
original
update group
soft Soft reconfig inbound and outbound updates
topology Routing topology instance
vpnv4 Address family
vpnv6 Address family
<cr>

You can choose between inbound, outbound or both. Let’s do inbound:

R2#clear ip bgp 192.168.12.1 in

You will see the following message on R2:

R2#
BGP: 192.168.12.1 sending REFRESH_REQ(5) for afi/safi: 1/1

R2 is sending a refresh request to R1, let's see what R1 thinks of this:

R1#
BGP: 192.168.12.2 rcvd REFRESH_REQ for afi/safi: 1/1

Now look at the BGP table of R2 again:

R2#show ip bgp
BGP table version is 5, local router ID is 192.168.12.2
Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i -
internal,
r RIB-failure, S Stale, m multipath, b backup-path, x best-
external, f RT-Filter
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete

Network Next Hop Metric LocPrf Weight Path

 *> 1.1.1.1/32 192.168.12.1 222 0 1 i
*> 11.11.11.11/32 192.168.12.1 222 0 1 i

Very nice, the metric has been updated and we didn't clear the BGP session...mission
accomplished!

When you enable soft recon guration, your router will no longer send a route refresh
update request to its BGP neighbor but it will use the routing information that it stored for
this neighbor.

Configurations

Want to take a look for yourself? Here you will nd the con guration of each device.

R1
hostname R1
!
interface Loopback 0
ip address 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.255
!
interface Loopback 1
ip address 11.11.11.11 255.255.255.255
!
interface fastEthernet0/0
ip address 192.168.12.1 255.255.255.0
!
router bgp 1
neighbor 192.168.12.2 remote-as 2
network 1.1.1.1 mask 255.255.255.255
network 11.11.11.11 mask 255.255.255.255
!
end

R2
hostname R2
!
interface fastEthernet0/0
ip address 192.168.12.2 255.255.255.0
!
router bgp 2
neighbor 192.168.12.1 remote-as 1
neighbor 192.168.12.1 route-map METRIC in
!
route-map METRIC permit 10
 set metric 222
!
end

That's all I have for now. Hopefully this has helped you to understand the route refresh capability.
If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment.

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Home › Forums › BGP Route Refresh Capability

This topic contains 8 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by   Mohammad Hasanuz Z 3
weeks ago.

Viewing 8 posts - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

Author
Posts  | Subscribe
October 1, 2014 at 09:44 #11392 Reply

Holmes
Hi Rene,

I really enjoyed the presentation of your book called how to master ccna. This is the kind of
presentation im looking for but most of these books out there have too much detail. Do you have a
book for CCENT or atleast can you recommend a similar book for CCENT?

Thanks
Holmes

January 20, 2015 at 22:02 #11393 Reply

sutandra C
Member
Your discussion on BGP synchronization is excellent. Really explains the topic. Many Thanks

January 20, 2015 at 22:06 #11394 Reply

Rene Molenaar
Keymaster
Glad to hear that you enjoyed it!

April 8, 2016 at 19:19 #23270 Reply

Navid D
Participant
Thank you for this clear demo.

Anything about Enhanced Route Refresh ?

Thanks,

April 8, 2016 at 22:13 #23277 Reply

Rene Molenaar
Keymaster
Hi Navid,

Glad to hear you like it.

I don’t have anything on Enhanced Route Refresh at the moment. I’ll add it to my list, might be nice
for the future.

Rene

August 3, 2016 at 00:02 #27710 Reply

XIN W
Participant
question:

why we need “R2#clear ip bgp 192.168.12.1 in” here to make R2 sent Route-refresh? it should send
automatically if route-refresh is supported and negotiated, thanks

August 30, 2016 at 11:58 #29544 Reply

Rene Molenaar
Keymaster
Hi Xin,

Using the clear ip bgp in command is a nice way to manually request a route refresh from your
neighbor.

Once you do this, you can see it in the debug that R2 is requesting R1 for a refresh:

R2#
BGP: 192.168.12.1 sending REFRESH_REQ(5) for afi/safi: 1/1

Rene

November 20, 2016 at 07:21 #35642 Reply

Mohammad Hasanuz Z
Participant
Hi Rene,

In summary ….

HARD RESET : It will tear down TCP session as well as BGP session.Establishing new BGP session,
will send Route refresh request to neighbor and learn all pre x again also network interuption will
occured.

Soft Recon guration : Need More Memory due to store RAW Pre x in seperate table. No network
interuption and will not send any Route refresh request.

Route Refresh : This is the most suitable method.No network interuption , no extra memory
needed.Just send a Route refresh request.

Please correct me if I am wrong with my understanding .Thx

br/zaman

Author
Posts

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