Term of the Day - Atomic Aggregate!
I think I might be the type that is easily amused, but I love a good networking term. My latest one is Atomic Aggregate, which refers to a “well-known discretionary” attribute that can be attached to a BGP route. That all is just a fancier way of saying that this is a route attribute that all routers running BGP should understand and that it is not necessary to set that attribute on a route if it doesn’t need it. An Atomic Aggregate attribute set on a route means that the routers sending that route have lost some of the path information for that route, so it might not be as reliable as another route learned elsewhere. Often this happens when more specific path information is lost in the process of aggregating routes. Aggregation is just the fancy BGP term for summarization. It seems BGP has a lot of very fancy terms.
So, this week I’ve been working some with multicast at work and reading about BGP. I hope to watch my videos on BGP this weekend and then all I’ll have left are some of the bits and pieces left to read and watch and, hopefully, my lab portfolio will arrive in time to do some hard-core lab work. I’m already thinking a certain Amazon seller is going to get some poor feedback on this one, though…I’ve ordered 3 other things off Amazon since I ordered that lab portfolio and all have arrived before it. I’m thinking it’s about time to contact the seller and request a refund since they haven’t contacted me at all to explain why the order is taking this long. Ugh…the things we do to save some money on books!
