Re:Large BGP Communities beacon in the wild
by dredmorbius on Sunday October 16, 2016 @03:07PM
(#12720357)
There've been some really good technical answers, I'm going to address the conceptual.
The Internet is a set of interconnected networks. These are "internetworked" together.
BGP is the protocol, border gateway protocol, which lets those individual networks know how to find one another.
The individual networks are known as "autonomous systems". This is a single uniform zone of autonomous control, under a single authority (more-or-less -- there are exceptions to everything). An Autonomous System (AS) is identified by an Autonomous System Number (ASN). It's comprised of a number of contiguous network blocks (go look up The CIDR Report if you want to see these). And it finds its neighbours and peers by way of BGP, as previously noted.
I'll second the recommendation for Halabi's book, which remains the definitive text.
Good question, and though this isn't something that turns up every day, it's what's underlying your use of the Net.
The Internet is a set of interconnected networks. These are "internetworked" together.
BGP is the protocol, border gateway protocol, which lets those individual networks know how to find one another.
The individual networks are known as "autonomous systems". This is a single uniform zone of autonomous control, under a single authority (more-or-less -- there are exceptions to everything). An Autonomous System (AS) is identified by an Autonomous System Number (ASN). It's comprised of a number of contiguous network blocks (go look up The CIDR Report if you want to see these). And it finds its neighbours and peers by way of BGP, as previously noted.
I'll second the recommendation for Halabi's book, which remains the definitive text.
Good question, and though this isn't something that turns up every day, it's what's underlying your use of the Net.