Peering and IXP Workshop (PIXP)
Synopsis
This is a technical workshop, made up of lecture and hands-on lab work to teach the Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) skills required for configuring interconnections between the autonomous networks that make up the Internet according to current industry best practices. The course uses both IPv4 and IPv6 in a dual stack infrastructure.
Workshop Topics
Workshop topics include, but are not limited to:
- IS-IS design and best practices for Service Provider networks
- BGP protocol, attributes and policy control
- BGP Best Practices, including Aggregation
- BGP multihoming techniques (redundancy and load balancing)
- BGP Communities as used by Network Operators
- Peering Best Practices
- Internet Exchange Point Design and Best Practices
The skills learned during this course will help improve the performance of the NREN and the campus networks connected to them. In turn this will give a better end user experience, and will improve the over all participation in and utilisation of the global R&E infrastructure.
Target Audience
The course is suitable for technical staff who are now building or operating network operator or service provider infrastructure and are planning to interconnect with other networks and/or participate in an Internet Exchange Point. It is also suitable for technical staff building or operating Internet Exchange Points, who wish to improve the utilisation of and participation in their IXP.
Prerequisites
This is not an introduction to routing. It is a requirement that workshop participants are proficient with a router command line interface, have a good understanding of OSPF or IS-IS, and have used BGP in an operational network.
- Medium to good knowledge of the UNIX/Linux command line environment
- Participants are required to bring a laptop
Objectives
At the end of the workshop, students will be able to:
- Configure IS-IS within their network infrastructure, according to industry best practices.
- Know how to operate a dual stack network, and be aware of the similarities and differences between IPv4 and IPv6.
- Be conversant in the BGP protocol, and know how to use the different BGP attributes to achieve different policies.
- Configure BGP policies to implement peering with other operators, either using private interconnects, or at Internet Exchange Points.
- Be aware of IXP design and operational good practices
- Be aware of the best practices for using BGP on the Internet today, including Aggregation and Scaling.