17 comments on “Juniper’s mysterious inet.3 table

  1. Really good article on a vaguely documented topic, very clear and concise. It was nice to read a networking topic that cut to the chase. Thank you!

    PS. I think there is a typo with the label number in point 2 under “There are a few things to note here:” section.

    • I hadn’t been maintaining the blog for a while and saw your comment languishing. Thanks, and I’ll look at the typo for you.

  2. Thanks a lot. U saved me and any one looking about inet.3 dozens of pages and lots of reading hours. Appreciated.

  3. Very clear, recently I was involved in a IOT project including Juniper MX, inet.3 really confused me lot.

    Thank you for sharing.

    Looking forward to more of your blog.

    BR//Jeff

    • It’s explained in the article. inet.0 is the main routing table on a Juniper router. inet.3 is used for BGP to resolve its next hop. It simply looks for the best route (i.e., lowest route preference) and uses that. If it happens to be in inet.3, great. If it’s in inet.0, fine. I plan to expand on this article soon if still confused.

  4. Great explanations,
    still have a confusions about the output of the route entry on r2 for our destination of 200.9.9.0/24:
    There is the line saying:
    Next hop: 200.1.23.3 via ge-0/0/2.0 weight 0x1, selected
    If we consider that the protocol next hop is 200.255.255.9, which is the loopback0.0 address of r9. What does the line for next-hop helps for?

    Ahmed

  5. “If the preferences were equal, Junos prefers inet.3”

    Is there a way to make the router load balance between inet.0 and inet.3 ?

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