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.

IMPORTANT: If you use a Cato reserved BGP community, make sure to configure BGP filtering on the BGP routers to prevent advertising the Cato system range to the Sockets. Otherwise, there can be significant connectivity issues with the impacted Sockets.

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