So this series is now going to look at the BGP best current practices. The best current practices covered here have been accumulated over the years from network operators who have shared their experiences: what they've been doing, how they configure BGP which should be optimally configured and optimally operated in the network. As the internet grows and develops what we've considered as best practices for BGP have grown and developed as well. Even though BGP is very old protocol, the industry and the community are always finding better ways of improving the efficiency and the scalability of BGP. And we're going to look at some of these as we work through the next set of slides. So when we start off we need to first look at how we go about configuring BGP. Most network operators today consider templating a very, very important part of the network deployment and network infrastructure. So on the screen you see a typical basic template that somebody might be using for Cisco IOS. For Cisco IOS you'd set up a BGP template with your AS number, you would configure deterministic MED, as we've covered in attribute presentation, to make BGP behavior on Cisco IOS the same as for other vendors you turn off Cisco's default assumption that all neighbors will exchange IPv4 prefixes. This is peculiar to Cisco IOS and you don't find it in other implementations. You would also make BGP's protocol distance greater than that of any other protocol and make sure that eBGP's distance is at least the same as that of iBGP. Most operators still use some very old Cisco configuration called "no synchronization" and "no auto summary". These still stick in templates even though they're now default in Cisco IOS.

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