Question 320
At fictional Bluehaven Mobile, during an intercity fiber refresh, engineers report: A service provider moves a tunnel peer and forgets to update underlay routing to its GRE destination, leaving encapsulation blackholed. Which networking principle most accurately explains the observed failure?
Explanation
Correct Answer
GRE encapsulates packets between outer IP endpoints; the underlay must route the outer destination before inner traffic can succeed. That is the specific distinction behind the observed outage. The targeted fix is to restore underlay IP reachability between GRE tunnel endpoints and validate encapsulated probe traffic.
Incorrect Answers
This principle matters when troubleshooting GRE tunnel path MTU, but using it here mistakes a different failure mode for GRE endpoint underlay routing. The relevant distinction is: GRE encapsulates packets between outer IP endpoints; the underlay must route the outer destination before inner traffic can succeed.
A BGP path is not usable merely because UPDATE is received; next-hop resolution is required for route selection and installation. That describes BGP next-hop reachability, whereas the observed symptoms are caused by GRE endpoint underlay routing; it does not predict the reported behavior.
GRE provides encapsulation and protocol carriage but does not inherently supply confidentiality or cryptographic integrity. Those conditions do not account for the specific GRE endpoint underlay routing problem reported by Bluehaven Mobile.