Inter Vendor Compatibility

The world of routing and networking is well defined with clear protocol specification to allow for seamless communication. BGP, for instance, is BGP and configuring a BGP session toward an FRR router is the same as configuring a BGP session toward a VyOS router, except it isn't.

Vendors sometimes adjust their application of protocol suites in their devices to help assist users in configuring and using the devices. For example, the BGP service of one router might have extra informational flags that it sends out to neighbors, that assist in identifying that they both run the same software. There may be underlying configurations to help assist in accepting routes from session running the same OS, bypassing the need to specify that routers advertised by neighbors should be written to the RIB.

For the lab, one such case applies when configuring iBGP between VyOS and FRR routers, where the FRR routers by default don't accept the routes they gain from a VyOS router. To accept these routes, a route-map must be applied to the session, specifying an action of setting the next-hop of the routes coming from the VyOS router to the VyOS-router.