Cisco IOS/XE Hates Redistributed Static IPv6 Routes
Writing tests that check the correctness of network device configurations is hard (overview, more details). It’s also an interesting exercise in getting the timing just right:
- Routing protocols are an eventually-consistent distributed system, and things eventually appear in the right place (if you got the configurations right), but you never know when exactly that will happen.
- You can therefore set some reasonable upper bounds on when things should happen, and declare failure if the timeouts are exceeded. Even then, you’ll get false positives (as in: the test is telling you the configurations are incorrect, when it’s just a device having a bad hair day).
And just when you think you nailed it, you encounter a device that blows your assumptions out of the water.