Flexing the Windows RRAS BGP implementation
At this point I am a bit of a BGP protocol implementation connoisseur thanks to my day job, however there is one implementation that has been in the back of my mind (In the information hazard kind of way) for quite some time now, and that is the Microsoft Windows RRAS BGP implementation.
RRAS ( or by its longer name “Routing and Remote Access” ) has existed in Windows NT releases for a very long time, allowing windows to speak RIPv2 (or OSPFv2) as the only official way to do dynamic network routing on windows, however in Windows Server 2016 RRAS shipped with BGP4 support!
This means that Windows can now talk the load bearing dynamic routing protocol of the internet, and so allows us to do some very fun experiments in pushing it to its limits! All of the previous documentation I have found on the internet for RRAS’s BGP support have only been mentioning IPv4, however I intend to operate this with only IPv6 for extra “fun”!
To get started I obviously had to install Windows. Now, I have been out of the windows game for quite a while, so I grabbed a ISO for Windows Server 2022 and installed it in a evaluation mode, And I was quite surprised to find that the first login screen looked like this:
