Are there any consequences to increasing the BGP Hold Time? What exactly does this do? I had an issue last night where our fiber connection maxed out and my MT reported "Hold Timer Expired". The router then rebooted itself and after reboot failed to re-establish the BGP session with my provider. It reported TCP Connection Established and then instantly reported Connection Terminated. I shut BGP off and back on and everything connected fine afterwards.
I'm guess my congestion caused my router to not be able to talk to their router for a time. The default Hold time is 180. Is this seconds or minutes? My BGP peer only sends me a default route, not a full route so is there any reason why I should not increase this time? The congestion only lasts an hour or 2 in the evenings and we are working toward having our pipe increased to take care of that.
Thanks.