All across the Internet, the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, is used to direct network traffic from one site to another. Here’s a look at how BGP works.
Many system administrators refer to networking — and the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) in particular — as black magic or voodoo, a domain not to be trifled with and one best left to the highly-specialized network shaman. Perhaps, but not every village can afford a network shaman; often, it’s up to the local system administrator to perform all the miracles.
If your servers are accessed from the Internet and you have or are considering redundant Internet connections (say, a pair of T1 circuits), understanding BGP — what it does, how it works, and how you can leverage it to your benefit — is a real advantage. With BGP, you can solve network performance problems faster than your ISP, independently work around ISP outages, and increase your overall uptime.
As you’ll see, BGP is critical to the operation of the Internet. And while BGP is a large and complex protocol, it’s not magic. (But don’t tell that to the local villagers. Increase uptime and they’ll come to worship you.)
To connect to an Internet server, your computer must be able to send requests to a host and, reciprocally, that host must be able to send replies back to you. But how does your request reach the remote host, and in the case of the remote host, how does its reply reach you?
First, each computer connected to the Internet has an Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP address, like a street address, uniquely identifies…
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