How Does Internet Work

(Part II) Virtual Routing and Forwarding

This is the second part in the series of posts dedicated to network virtualization and path isolation.

Ever needed one extra router? It’s possible to split the router into more logical routers by using VRF. How? Here’s how!

Virtual Routing and Forwarding or VRF allows a router to run more that one routing table simultaneously. When running more routing tables in the same time, they are completely independent. For example, you could use overlapping IP addresses inside more VRFs on the same router and they will function independently without conflict (You can see this kind of overlap in the example below). It is possible to use same VRF instance on more routers and connect every instance separately using VRF dedicated router port or only a sub-interface.

You can find VRFs to be used on ISP side. Provider Edge (PE) routers are usually running one VRF per customer VPN so that one router can act as a PE router for multiple Customer Edge (CE) routers even with more customers exchanging the same subnets across the VPN. By running VRF per customer, those subnets will never mix in-between them.

VRFs are used to create multiple virtual routers from one physical router.

Every VRF is creating his own Routing table and CEF table, basically a separate RIB and FIB.

How it works?

If you have two routers / two Layer3 switches connected with two L3 links (two paths) you can route with two equal static routes towards the same prefix and the router will load balance traffic across both links.

The idea is to make two same static routes on the same router but with different next-hops. The question was: Which link or which route will be used? And if the traffic will be load balanced, which mechanism will be used to share the traffic across both of links.

ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 192.168.10.2
ip route 10.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 192.168.11.2

CoPP – Control Plane Protection or better Control Plain Policing. It is the only option to make some sort of flood protection or QoS for traffic going to control plane.

In the router normal operation the most important traffic is control plain traffic. Control plane traffic is traffic originated on router itself by protocol services running on it, destined to other router device on the network. In order to run properly, routers need to speak with each other. They speak with each other by rules defined in protocols and protocols are running in shape of router services.

Examples for this kind of protocols are routing protocols like BGP, EIGRP, OSPF or some other non-routing protocols like CDP etc..

Control Plane Policing is QoS applied on ingress sub-interfacess towards Route Processor

When router is making BGP neighbour adjacency with the neighbouring router, it means that both routers are running BGP protocol service on them. BGP service is generating control plane traffic, sending that traffic to BGP neighbour and receiving control plane traffic back from the neighbour.

Usage of Control Plane Protection is important on routers receiving heavy traffic of which to many packets are forwarded to Control Plane. In that case, we can filter traffic based on predefined priority classes that we are free to define based on our specific traffic pattern.

I recently started studying again, this time as an attempt of deep-diving into some security concepts for one of my PhD courses. It’s interesting how, as much as you try to escape from it, mathematics will sooner or later catch you somewhere and you will need to learn a bit more of it. At least that happened to me…

In this process I realised that if you go beyond simple security theory and network device configuration all other stuff is pure mathematics.

The reason behind my unplanned course in mathematics is explained through the rest of this text. It will explain what is network security and where is the math needed to get network communication secure. In the end, it was actually fun.

Encryption

If you want two distant computers to talk with each other so that nobody else can see what they are talking about, you want to make a secure network connection between them. Security in this case means that you need to connect those machines to the network and be able to make the communication a secret communication. Secret communication through public communication system is possible by using encryption.

How Nagle’s algorithm is making TCP/IP better and when is ok to use it. Truth be told, Nagle should be avoided in today’s high-speed networks.

This article it’s not about mathematics, don’t be afraid. I’m running a networking blog and it’s not my intention to speak or write about anything related to mathematics. Biggest math problem that I’ve done in last few years is some simple subneting, EIGRP metric calculation and that is where I stopped with math for now.

On the other hand, I love the theory behind algorithms, specially if the algorithm is used in networking and if it is so simple and powerful as Nagle’s algorithm.

You can guess, John Nagle is the name of the fellow who created the algorithm. He found a solution for TCP/IP efficiency issue also known as “small packet problem”.

Here’s what happens:

I found different kinds of explanations about what Proxy ARP is, just few of them were understandable at first. After merging all of them this explanation came out of my networking workshop:

• Assuming that a router has an ARP entry of some IP address, if he receives an ARP request from somebody for that IP, the router will respond with its own MAC address.
• Proxy ARP is fairly simple technique for nodes to get MAC address of a destination host that is on a different subnet but on the same router. Same router different interface.

And this one to:

• If we have in the network one edge router that is our way out from the local LAN network. That router has Proxy ARP enabled by default. When it receives an ARP request on his interface for a client that is not actually from that local network it will try to be helpful and it will search his routing table if that network is locally connected on some other local interface. If he finds it, it will respond with his own MAC address to tell the source that he is the way to go towards that host.

If we look at the image below, I prepared a more detailed example for those who are still a bit confused about it.

It’s a technique that enables our R7 router on the image below to proxy ARP request from C1 computer which tries to find MAC address of computer C3.

You need to note that C1 has address from /16 range and that is why it thinks that 192.168.50.50 is on the same subnet as 192.168.1.11 . If that was not the case and C1 had the address 192.168.1.11/24, it would send the ARP asking what is MAC address of default gateway. It will go to default gateway because he will know that he is not directly connected to all of network 192.168.0.0/16. We are then talking about standard routing by getting the packets from one subnet to another using routing table examination.