Cato Reserved BGP Communities

This article discusses how to use Cato reserved BGP communities.

Overview

Cato provides a list of reserved BGP communities with hard-coded behavior for handling and processing incoming BGP prefixes from the neighboring routing devices. When Cato receives a BGP prefix marked with a reserved community, it will handle it according to the section below, Cato's Reserved BGP Communities.

This is the structure for Cato reserved communities: Cato peer ASN:<reserved value>. For example, a Socket site with a BGP neighbor that we want to apply the Socket isolated routing reserved community:

  • Cato ASN is 65001

  • LAN switch is defined with Cato Peer ASN is 65002

  • To keep routes local on the Socket, add the following BGP community to the Cato Peer BGP process: 65001:32768. This is based on the reserved value 32768 (see table below).

    For example, for Cisco routers, the command would be set community 65001:32768, and you need to specify the Cato ASN.

For more about defining the Cato peer ASN, see Configuring BGP Neighbors for a Cato Socket.

Cato's Reserved BGP Communities

The following table describes the reserved BGP communities and their functionality.

Name

BGP Community

Applies To

Description

Socket isolated routing

<Cato ASN>:32768

Socket sites with Socket v15 or higher

  • The Socket installs the received BGP prefixes tagged with the reserved community in the routing table

  • The Socket doesn't propagate these prefixes to the PoP

  • For routing decisions, the Socket prefers BGP routes tagged with the reserved community over routes received from the PoP in the Cato Cloud

  • Sample use case - route all the WAN traffic over the Alt WAN network, and only the Internet and SDP user traffic is sent over the Cato Cloud

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  • Comment author
    Bert-Jan Kamp

    This article is not clear and lacks an example

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