Hi, Alex. If it helps, I've had a variant of this on our transit routers for enterprise purposes for a few years. We run DFZ and originate 0/0 and ::/0 internally, but because we follow
them to the nearest egress (0/0 using NAT for path symmetry, ::/0 using conditional advertisement for path symmetry), we want to only originate the internal default routes if the external peering at that egress is "healthy". For IOS-XR, it effectively looks
like this:
route-policy PS-TRANSIT-UP-IPV4
if rib-has-route in TRANSIT-SUBNETS-V4 then
pass
endif
end-policy
!
route-policy PS-TRANSIT-UP-IPV6
if rib-has-route in TRANSIT-SUBNETS-V6 then
pass
endif
end-policy
prefix-set TRANSIT-SUBNETS-V4
212.123.212.184/30
end-set
!
prefix-set TRANSIT-SUBNETS-V6
2001:920:3815::64/127
end-set
neighbor-group EBGP-CRT-IPV4
...
address-family ipv4 unicast
...
default-originate route-policy PS-TRANSIT-UP-IPV4
neighbor-group EBGP-CRT-IPV6
...
address-family ipv6 unicast
...
default-originate route-policy PS-TRANSIT-UP-IPV6
We keep those stanzas simple — is the direct link to the peer up, and therefore the direct route is in our RIB — but depending on the platform you're using, you may have more knobs to
check things. For example, I can't directly check if a BGP peer is up/down, though I can match on routes the peer has given us (or lack thereof).
-dp
From:
NANOG <nanog-bounces+dzimmerman=linkedin.com@nanog.org> on behalf of Alex Buie <abuie@cytracom.com>
Date: Wednesday, December 20, 2023 at 10:45 AM
To: nanog@nanog.org <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Arista “IP-SLA” / Active Probing
We find ourselves trying to solve a requirement where we would like to test the viability of our paths to the internet and tear down the bgp session if it is determined to be faulty. We had an issue recently
where we did not lose link or bgp but the carrier lost the ability to route traffic to the internet for us and our existing automatic detection and remediation strategies failed to detect this condition and we lost customer packets.
Conceptually, we have a pair of DCS7050-QX landing a fiber each from two ISPs with default routes on BGP at a dozen POPs around the US.
One of the ISPs is our primary transit, and one is predominantly for peered customers, but we can use it for transit during issues with the primary circuits.
I did some research on this and it seems like perhaps the on-boot event handler launching a python daemon to do this active probing out each isp circuit and then making config changes in response to transit
failures might be the best option available to us.
However, I thought I’d reach out to the broader community to see if there’s a better way to solve this, has an example script, or if anyone has recommendations for methods of active monitoring for protecting
against this sort of failure.
Thanks in advance for any insight and time.