Python for Network Engineers - Part 1

In this blog article, we’re going to look at how to get started learning Python as a Network Engineer.

We’ll look at some great resources to use to learn the basics, some links to source network focused resources and steer in the right direction for modules and packages which a network engineer will find useful.

This will also be the first blog in a series.  In subsequent posts, we are going to walk through using Python and APIs to configure various devices such as Junos, Cisco Nexus, F5, Arista and Palo Alto.

BGP RT Constrained Route Distribution

BGP RT Constrained Route Distribution is described in RFC 4684 and provides a mechanism for MP-BGP peers to exchange RT (route target) information and automatically filter outbound route updates based on this information.

MPLS spoke to spoke connectivity

So here’s a question for you.  In an MPLS hub and spoke design, can the spoke sites route to each other without adding any additional route-target (RT) values?  In a word yes, so let us see how.

BGP Route Refresh Capability

In this blog post, we're going to talk about BGP route refresh capability and how this is affected by using the neighbor soft-reconfiguration feature on Cisco platforms.

Cisco IS-IS and OSPF prefix prioritisation

This post explains how prefix prioritisation can be configured in both IS-IS and OSPF to gain faster convergence.  This is particularly useful for MPLS or financial SSM multicast environments where we can easily distinguish the routes that should receive priority.

Cisco Carrier Delay

Here are some quick tips on fast convergence on Cisco using Carrier Delay.

The quickest way to converge a network is when the router notices an interface go down, this is controlled by the carrier delay setting.  On WAN circuits, or where switches are between two routers, we may need to rely on our IGP/BGP/BFD timers, so this is not a replacement for tuning those parameters too.

F5 Big-IP Auto Last Hop

Here is a quick note on a not very well understood Big-IP feature

Auto Last Hop maintains a connection table recording the interface and MAC address of the upstream device which sent the flow to the Big-IP and sends reply packets to this interface/MAC address.   This feature can also be called “reverse persistence”.