Cisco Guides
Field notes on Cisco IOS — routing, switching, VRF and BGP design, and the operational details that make the difference under pressure.
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BGP Route Dampening Part 1: The Flapping Problem, Exponential Decay, and Cisco Configuration
A deep dive into how BGP route dampening works: the 1990s internet instability that created it, the exponential decay algorithm behind it, every Cisco parameter explained, and a full configuration and verification reference.
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BGP Route Dampening Part 2: RFC 7454, BFD, and Where Dampening Still Belongs
Why the IETF now discourages global BGP route dampening, how Bidirectional Forwarding Detection interacts with it, what RFC 7454 actually says, and the specific modern scenarios where dampening remains the right answer.
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Adding Vendor Route-Table Parsers to route-compare, and Why the Work Lives on a Branch
A follow-up on the route-compare tool: I taught it to read raw show ip route, get router info routing-table all, show route, and show routing route output directly — no Excel cleanup step. The work lives on a branch rather than on main, and this is why.
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Netmiko in Practice: From a Show-Command Script to a Repeatable Audit Tool
A working network engineer's guide to Netmiko — starting from a small repo of mine that runs show commands across a JSON inventory, and extending it into something you can use as a real audit tool with structured output, concurrency, secure credentials, and a sane dry-run for config changes.
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Route Leaking Between VRFs on Cisco IOS: From BGP First Principles to Advanced Manipulation
A practical end-to-end walkthrough of route leaking between VRFs on Cisco IOS — starting with the BGP and VRF fundamentals you need to actually understand what's happening, the static and MP-BGP options for the leak itself, and the route-map machinery that lets you control exactly what crosses.