Global Crossing Contact / BGP and SONET interaction question

Wed Jul 26 07:29:07 UTC 2006

Randy Epstein wrote:
> I don't have an answer to the root cause of your problem, and I'm not 
> looking for a discussion on route dampening (there are enough debates 
> onthis issue to make your head spin), but may I suggest you raise your 
> hold timers to prevent your BGP sessions from going down on short 
> disturbances as these?
 From what I can tell the disturbances are less than a second in 
duration.   It doesn't appear that this is a hold-timer issue, although 
I would like GX to set it at something higher than 90 seconds (mine is 
already at a higher value- but the lower value wins during 
negotiation).    I really suspect that either a) GX has some semi-weird 
configuration where the SONET ring switching from the normal to the 
protect path and back causes BGP to reset on the border router I'm 
attached to or b) There is a separate issue which is causing BGP to 
flap.  Or of course, something else completely different.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to talk to anyone 
at GX which actually has access to the routers and knows anything about 
BGP.  

-forrest