Ramblings of an aging IT geek
← Ramblings of an aging IT geek
networking

i put bgp in the spare room and i regret nothing

Running BGP between a couple of homelab nodes to advertise service IPs, mostly to learn it properly rather than because I needed it.

Network cabling in a rack

There is no honest justification for running BGP in a house. I have three machines and a router. The entire network would fit comfortably in a single static route written on the back of an envelope. I did it anyway, because the best way to stop BGP feeling like dark magic is to break it somewhere that only annoys me.

The setup is small. I run FRR on the two main nodes and on the router, peering over the lab VLAN. Each node advertises a little /32 for the service IPs it's currently hosting, so when a service moves the route follows it without me touching anything by hand.

router bgp 65010
 neighbor 10.10.0.1 remote-as 65000
 address-family ipv4 unicast
  network 10.10.20.5/32
 exit-address-family

The first evening was the usual comedy. Sessions stuck in Connect, a firewall rule quietly eating port 179, and me confidently advertising a prefix the router had no reason to accept. Once it came up, watching a service IP fail over and the route reconverge in under a second was genuinely satisfying.

Do I recommend this? Not for any practical reason. But I understand route reflectors and AS paths in my fingers now rather than from a diagram, and the next time BGP misbehaves at work it won't be a stranger. That alone was worth the lost evening.