Structure of This Chapter
This chapter will work a little bit differently than other chapters in this book. Rather than having, for example, a first recipe that sets up all of the features of a basic MPLS network, we will spend the first several recipes showing how to configure each of the essential types of routers in the same simple network. Then we will examine some interesting and useful variations.
We need to do it this way for two reasons. First, there are so many routers involved in even a simple MPLS network that it's more logical to take them individually and explain the configurations one at a time. Second, some of the individual router configurations, particularly for the PE routers, are rather long, and need to be discussed in some depth.
Consequently, we will use the same basic network, shown in Figure 26-2, for all of the recipes in this chapter. The router names and connections used throughout this chapter will be consistent with this picture, although we won't necessarily talk about every router in every recipe, and we will only show those portions of each router configuration that are relevant to the concept being discussed.