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Good books on learning BGP?
Any tips for a good book on learning BGP and networks (nice would be: with BIRD) from zero to good basic understanding?
As BGP does not change that much, older books might be fine.
(no, won't be near any real network engineering, so please not Cisco etc. specific)
Comments
Just get an unfiltered session and experiment. No better way of learning. /s
Atm I'm down w/ covid+high fever so I won't be sitting too much at a computer. That's why I remembered the idea of books again
to read first and than break everything later while experimenting.
Sorry to hear, man. I caught COVID in Italy 3 weeks ago. Generally, 3 days with fever, which were meh, and then 2 weeks of coughing. But I can't confirm if coughing is strictly related, as I also stopped smoking around a month ago, so yeah.
I agree with @AlexBarakov . BGP is one of those things you really have to struggle with for you to fully understand its ways.
Tools such as https://www.enginyring.com/tools/bgpgen may help you to begin with.
Also, Claude free version does a nice job at explaining things. Give it a try.
Announce 8.8.8.0/24 and observe.
Plan was: first read sth., than play with e.g. internal networks for BIRD basics (e.g. with wg-Mesh by @Neoon ) than enter the play/learning zone with a ipv6 range etc.
But if no one has any good book idea, I will pester my deekseek and gpt-oss:120b again. (Deepseek might fear I'm asking it about the GFW though
)
I learned a lot of things by reading vendor documentation and relevant RFCs, not sure if this will work out for you.
I did things like that when I was young and it was good, now my brain is getting too old.
I nearly took my network down last week, IP collision.
Smokeping can get pretty colorful.
However, I never have seen the point, on getting an ASN, its just costing me money.
Yea you can peer with other people, but what gives.
But how is it different from old books covering technical topics? I wouldn't say that they are easier to read. The only benefit of books I can think of is that all information already combined and sorted for you.
There's a bunch of resources you can use:
https://learn.nsrc.org/bgp
dn42.eu
https://neptunenetworks.com/ - No idea if they're still active, never used them but it's an interesting product.
Maybe you will find https://dn42.eu/Home useful to test some approaches without messing with "real" Internet (which might be just a bit pricey)
Ultimate goal: multi-cross-provider anycast (if that will even be possible, atm I starting at zero knowledge, so this is like a year or two year project with lots of steps in between).
@filtered thank you for reminding me on dn42.eu and also the other ones.
I mean yea, nice goal.
However, not many provide a BGP session.
Even less for VPS and even less for a reasonable cost / free.
So I ended up using OSPF instead, because any VPS just runs it.
I mean you could use iBGP fine too but nah.
A global community iBGP network would be lit though.
So, no one is reading books anymore, but this thread collects a lot of good starting points. And gpt-oss is currently producing a 3 month learning plan for me. Also with a reading list of RFCs for each learning session
@tentor
You can learnt a lot on dn42