The following example shows the output of the show ip bgp summary command for router R1 at this stage of the configuration.

vyatta@R1:~$ show ip bgp summary 
BGP router identifier 10.0.0.11, local AS number 100
RIB entries 1, using 64 bytes of memory
Peers 3, using 7560 bytes of memory

Neighbor        V    AS MsgRcvd MsgSent   TblVer  InQ OutQ Up/Down  State/PfxRcd
10.0.0.22       4   100       6      10        0    0    0 00:04:18        0
10.0.0.33       4   100       6      10        0    0    0 00:04:14        0
10.0.0.44       4   100       5       6        0    0    0 00:02:55        0

Total number of neighbors 3
vyatta@R1:~$

The most important fields in the output for show ip bgp summary are the Up/Down and State fields. All the iBGP peers for R1 show times in the Up/Down field, which means the connection has been “established” for that period of time. The established state indicates that the peers have successfully created a BGP connection between one another, and are now able to send and receive BGP update messages.

If a peer shows in either Active or Idle in the State field, it means there is some issue that is keeping the BGP peers from forming an adjacency.

• The Active state identifies that the local router is actively trying to establish a TCP connection to the remote peer. You may see this if the local peer has been configured, but the remote peer is unreachable or has not been configured.
• The Idle state indicates that the local router has not allocated any resources for that peer connection, so any incoming connection requests be refused.