Cisco CCNP / BSCI Certification: The BGP Attribute MED
When you’re preparing to pass the BSCI exam and earn your CCNP certification, one of the biggest challenges is learning BGP. BGP is totally different from any protocol you learned to earn your CCNA certification, and one of the differences is that BGP uses path attributes to favor one path over another when multiple paths to or from a destination exist.
Notice I said “to or from”. In earlier free BGP tutorials, I discussed the BGP attributes “weight” and “local preference”. These attributes are used to favor one path to a destination over another; for example, if BGP AS 100 has two paths to a destination in AS 200, these two attributes can be set in AS 100 to favor one path over another. But what if AS 100 wants to inform the routers in AS 200 as to which path it should use to reach a given destination in AS 100?
That’s where the BGP attribute “Multi-Exit Discriminator”, or MED, comes in. The MED value can be set in AS 100 to tell AS 200 which path it should use to reach a given network in AS 100.
As with many BGP attributes, the...
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