Started documenting my concept for customer focused MPLS today, i.e. we the customer have full autonomous control instead of the Service Provider - who ever that may be?

I am reasonably happy with the approach so far, but I’ll wait and see if I am breaking any best practice rules when I bounce this off our Cisco guru; so far I have elected to go with an iBGP core running LDP. using non-MPLS aware routers as route reflectors to fully mesh things and offer a little scalability.

How to offer multiple logical control at the CE end though?? In order to achieve this I have figured I’d go with eBGP peering to an elected private BGP AS getting around the obvious BGP problems this raises by using the ‘allowas-in’ and ‘as-override’ options and then mix in some vrf-lite with this on the CE devices and your vrf’s instantly stretch that little bit further without the need for an Enterprise image everywhere, oh and when it comes to internet access I’ll just peer with the public AS provided and look into ‘vrf-aware NAT’.

My next mission should I choose to accept it, is to get my head around QoS and figure out whether my approach is favourable for QoS or not.

The great thing about my job is I get to play with real kit! So it’s not all about theory at the end of the day. In that respect I consider myself extremly fortunate.

I have to say, I have gained a lot more appreciation this last week for the flexibility BGP provides when used in conjuntion with LDP it seems almost too simple at times, but then I haven’t factored in the QoS yet? So - this may all be moot. Can’t wait to plug my (our - sorry Jason!) muwahahahaa!!! lab into the voice test platform and run some voice calls across it….

In other news? Hmmm….let me see - I can’t wait for the new Indiana Jones movie!