[rayhaanj]

Totally agree that the iBGP vs eBGP thing is very confusing, even in some vendor documentation there are some assumptions on what an internal vs external session should do instead of leaving it up to the user to decide how to operate. I get that this is probably for simplicity but it would be nice to give the user the full flexibility of the protocol.

[leoc]

If you're talking about the restriction that prevents the forwarding of routes in one iBGP connection and out another, I think that's a requirement of the standard rather than something vendors have imposed. Because iBGP hops don't prepend anything to the AS path, there would be no mechanism to prevent routing loops if multi-hop iBGP route forwarding were enabled. (I'm just a CCNP sprog, not an expert.)