Brian Wilson

Brian WilsonAug 20, 2026

A client with 2 ISPs asked me: "How do I control which link my inbound traffic uses?" It's not as simple as outbound traffic, where you can use weight or local preference to manually prefer one route over another. The honest answer is that you can't totally control it. It's really up to upstream providers which route they want to use to send you traffic. But you can heavily influence which path they select using a technique called 👉 AS Path Prepending In the BGP path selection algorithm, AS path length usually decides which path is selected for inbound traffic. (It comes after weight, local pref, and locally originated, which are mostly useful for outbound traffic.) Prepending lets you artificially lengthen the AS path of the route you want de-preferred, by adding your own AS to it one or more times. When your ISPs advertise your routes upstream, the route with the shorter AS path will be selected. ⚙️ Example Config route-map PREPEND permit 10 set as-path prepend 65000 65000 router bgp 65000 neighbor [ip address] route-map PREPEND out Now anyone receiving your routes from that neighbor's ISP will see the longer path and prefer the alternate. 📊 Example Internet BGP Table BGP routing table entry for [prefix] Paths: (2 available, best #1) Path #1: 65000 65100 Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external Path #2: 65000 65000 65000 65200 Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external In this case traffic would be sent via Path #1 through ISP1 (AS 65100), since this has an AS path length of 2 instead of 4. ✅ Use cases for AS prepending: 1️⃣ Make one ISP primary and another backup 2️⃣ Load balance traffic more equally 💬 Have you ever needed to control inbound traffic from two or more ISPs?

Brian WilsonAug 18, 2026

In the Zayo NOC, I used to have 27 tabs open during a BGP outage. Email. Salesforce. BGP looking glass. WHOIS lookup. RIR database. And a bunch of other internal and external tools. Not to mention the PuTTY sessions to SSH into various routers and run verification commands. It was a pain to piece together what actually happened from all those different sources. But now, for the first time, FastNetMon has built a platform that brings together all that routing context in one place: Netomics. https://lnkd.in/gDS73422 Netomics is a self-hosted BGP routing intelligence platform that brings together live routing data, registry information, routing history, validation systems, and AI-assisted querying into a single operational environment — deployed entirely inside your own infrastructure. Specifically, it includes: * Live BGP and BMP feeds * Historical routing state and changes * ASN and prefix ownership data * Regional Internet Registry (RIR) data * WHOIS records * Internet Routing Registry (IRR) data * Geofeed information * RPKI validation * ASPA (Autonomous System Provider Authorization) status So instead of wasting time hopping between tools trying to correlate information, you can simply ask: “What is happening with this route?” And get the context you need. Netomics gives you real-time visibility into what's happening with your BGP routes. And because it runs inside your own infrastructure, your data doesn't have to be sent outside your network or depend on external APIs and their rate limits (a particularly important advantage when external Internet connectivity is unavailable). Netomics can also expose that routing intelligence through APIs, Prometheus, streaming interfaces, and MCP, allowing your automation and AI tools to query your routing data. If you work in a NOC, SOC, or other network engineering team and want to streamline BGP troubleshooting and visibility, check out Netomics at the link below: https://lnkd.in/gBKaJq_g

Brian WilsonAug 21, 2026

Stop posting technical content on LinkedIn! No one reads it. ...without a good hook, that is. I see so many network engineers out there posting fantastic content that gets like 3 likes. It doesn't matter how brilliant your deep dive is if no one sees it. If you want people to read your stuff, you need to learn how to write hooks. It's how I gained 15k followers and 1.7M views in one year. I regularly get over 100 likes on my posts, and good discussion in the comments. A good hook opens a loop in someone's brain that must be closed. It promises something valuable that they need to know. Most hooks fall into one of 6 categories: 1. Contrarian take 2. Personal story (how I...) 3. How to... 4. Brand/news/people highjacking 5. Transformation (before/after) 6. List (6 ways to...) Try one of these on your next technical post and watch your views/engagement skyrocket. Keep your hooks short and to the point (8-10 words), and use specific numbers when possible. You have to motivate someone to want to read before they can discover your brilliance! 💬 What's your best hook-writing tip?