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Routing Features
by David Davis, vExpert, VCP, CCIE 9369 - January 8, 2009
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The use of a dynamic routing protocol on a company's WAN and LAN is standard
practice today. Whether you use OSPF or EIGRP to automatically determine the path that
your traffic takes, at some point, for some reason, you may want to direct that traffic for
yourself. In this article, we will learn what Policy-based routing is, how it can help you,
and what a basic configuration looks like.
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The "matching" of the traffic is usually done with an ACL (access-control list) that is
referenced by a route-map. In the route-map, there is a "match" for the traffic defined in
that ACL then a "set" for that traffic where the network administrator defines what he or
she wants to happen to that traffic (prioritize it, route it differently, drop it, or other
actions). Policies can be based on IP address, port numbers, protocols, or size of packets.
This ACL permits only traffic with a destination IP of 10.1.1.1 (the traffic we want to
send elsewhere)
Router(config-route-map)#
Next, set your match policy to match the traffic in ACL 101, like this:
This will match all the traffic permitted through ACL 101.
Next, you need to set some action on that traffic. What do you want to happen to that
traffic? Let's tell the router to send it out interface Fast Ethernet 3/0, like this:
According to the official Cisco Policy Routing documentation, "One interface can have a
only one route map policy applied.tag; but you can have several route map entries, each
with its own sequence number. Entries are evaluated in order of their sequence numbers
until the first match occurs. If no match occurs, packets are routed as usual."
Route-map statements can have multiple lines of match and set statements. the "10" in the
original route-map statement above is the line number of that route-map statement. The
numbers of the route-map statements are very important as they determine the order that
the statements are processed and they can also be used to insert and delete individual
statements.
There are really a TON of things that you can MATCH and SET. For the full list, please
see the official Cisco Policy Routing documentation.
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