The engineering team at LINX have recently implemented BCP214 on some of their UK peering networks.
BCP214 is the practice of ensuring BGP sessions are forcibly torn down prior to service impacting maintenance activities being carried out on the LINX network. This update has been actioned following a high demand from the 950+ ASN strong LINX community.
BCP214 is implemented by filters being applied to the member interface filtering bidirectional TCP port 179 traffic. By culling BGP sessions, this reduces the amount of traffic disruption to LINX members by making BGP speakers pre-emptively converge onto different paths, so traffic blackholing is minimised.
The first roll out of BCP214 is on the LON2 network in London and also LINX Manchester as these are the networks on the Network Configuration Automation (NCA) enabled OCNOS platforms. These are the disaggregated networks using hardware from Edgecore Networks and software from IP Infusion.
LINX’s primary LAN in London, LON1 is expected to go live with BCP214 in the next quarter along with the US interconnection point, LINX NoVA.
The other regional interconnection points in the UK, LINX Scotland and LINX Wales, won’t be BCP214 enabled for now, as they are not yet automated LANs.
LINX members are automatically opted into this service but can choose to opt out by updating their preferences in the member account area of the portal.
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Mark Lloyd, Principal Network Engineer.