BGP4 and Routing Courses

In cooperation with Iljitch van Beijnum, author of the O'Reilly book "BGP" (ISBN0-596-00254-9) and the Apress book "Running IPv6" (ISBN 1-59059-527-0), NL-ix organizes two routing courses:

BGP4 Course

This course for beginners and moderately advanced participants is generally held four times a year. The next courses dates are:

Monday, june 9, 2008 - In English/Dutch Language (Registration Form).

Monday, september 8, 2008 - In Dutch Language (Registration Form).

Monday, december 8, 2008 - In English/Dutch Language (Registration Form).

The course has a theory part and a practical workshop part in which groups of 2 people actually setup a BGP configuration on a router (Cisco, Foundry or Zebra) and configure transit and peering over an Internet Exchange with other course participants. With the course each participant will receive the book "BGP" as documentation to take home.

Theory Part (morning)

Routing in general (routers, subnets, routing protocols);

What does BGP do and how does it work;

IP addresses (address blocks, CIDR);

PI/PA addresses and AS numbers (how do RIPE requests work);

BGP route selection mechanisms;

Influencing BGP (route maps/policies);

Peer groups;

Tools (whois, looking glass);

Recent issues (MD5);

Question round.

Practical Part (afternoon)

Activate BGP;

Filtering and advertising outgoing routes;

Accepting and filtering incoming routes;

Connecting to a transit provider;

Setting up peering;

Manipulating outgoing traffic (localpref);

Manipulating incoming traffic (AS path prepend);

Peer groups;

Filtering for security;

Recent issues (MD5);

Question round.

IPv6 & Advanced Routing (BGP4) Course

This course for moderately advanced participants is generally held two times a year. The next course dates are:

Tuesday, september 9, 2008 - In English Language (Registration Form).

The regular BGP course explains how to run BGP on a single router. This advanced course covers the details of using multiple (BGP) routers and IPv6. The format of the course is to explain theory and practice, and then to show working configurations and protocol interactions in a test network. Participants who bring a laptop with an IPv6-capable operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD) will be able to configure IPv6 on their own system and see how this interacts with the test network. With the course each participant will receive the book "Running IPv6" as documentation to take home.

Advanced Routing part:

Operation of the Quagga routing software (demo on Linux);
Providing redundancy with VRRP (Linux/Foundry);
Setting up iBGP using loopback addresses (Linux/Cisco);
Multiple links: ethernet trunking or multiple BGP sessions;
Using OSPF to distribute loopback and next hop addresses;
Load balancing traffic over multiple ISPs (Linux/Cisco);
Question round.

IPv6 part:

IPv6 basics;
Requesting IPv6 addresses from RIPE;
Putting IPv6 information in the DNS (BIND/Linux);
IPv6 routing: OSPFv3 and multiprotocol BGP (Linux/Cisco).
Question round.

If you are interested in following either ot both courses, please fill in, sign and fax the above registration form to +31 (0)70 392 22 16. Once we have received it, we will inform you if your registration has been accepted. If the course is full we might refer you to a different date. For questions or more information, please email us on info@nl-ix.net.

The courses are generally held in the Haagse Hogeschool in the Hague, between 10:00 (AM) and 16:00 hours. Each course has room for max. 10 (beginners) or 15 (advanced) participants. Costs of each course are 495 Euro. A laptop with ethernet is required to actively participate in the beginners course and useful (if it supports IPv6) in the advanced course. Coffee, tea and lunch is included in the course. If you already have the "BGP" or "Running IPv6" book, please let us know in advance, and you will receive a 30 Euro on the course. Don't forget to bring it with you to the course in that case, as the book is used as reference material during the course.