Advanced BGP - BGP Communities

5 important questions on Advanced BGP - BGP Communities

What are BGP communities?

It is a Optional Transitive BGP Attribute used to provide additional capability to tag routes.
It's 32-bit number which can be displayed as a full 32 bit number (0-4.294.967.295) or as two 16 bit numbers (0-65535):(0-65535), reffered to as new format

What are Private BGP Communities

Private BGP Communities follow a particular convention where the first 16 bits represent the AS of the community origination, and the second 16 bits represent a pattern defined by the originating AS.

RFC 1997 defines a set of global communities known as well-known communities. What is the range of these communities and what are 3 common well known communities?

The range is 4.294.901.760 (0xFFFF0000) to 4.294.967.295 (0xFFFFFFFF)
Three well known communities are:
1. Internet (for routes that should be advertised to/on the Internet)
2. No_Advertise (Should not be advertised to any peer (iBGP or eBGP)
3. No_Export (Should only be advertised to iBGP peers, not to eBGP peers)
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What is important to note about advertising the BGP Communities to neighbors?

IOS and IOS XE do not advertise them by default to their neighbors. This is enabled under the address family command on a per neighor basis.

In BGP, what are community lists and what are they used for?

They have a similar structure to ACLs and are used for conditionally matching communities in route maps.

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