BGP testbed tools

Wed Jan 13 07:14:38 UTC 2010

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Jencks [mailto:ben at bjencks.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 3:28 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: BGP testbed tools
> 
> This is obviously a rookie question, but I haven't found anything by
> searching. I'm looking to set up a small testbed to simulate our
> internal network topology, and I want to have a realistic BGP table
> from the fake "upstream" routers. Ideally what I'd like to do is dump
> the BGP table from our production routers, strip the immediate
> neighbor AS, and load the table into Quagga or OpenBGPD to advertise.
> I'm running into two problems: how do you dump BGP tables in a
> machine-parseable format from IOS, and how do you make the route
> server advertise the routes as they were in the original table,
> including the full AS-path, communities, etc? If Quagga/OpenBGPD
> aren't the right tools, I'm happy to use something else.
> 
> This seems like it would be a pretty standard thing to do, but none of
> the tools I've found seem aimed at this sort of testbed.

Cisco has a tool called RouteM which they use for lots of BGP scalability testing.  I used it a lot back in my testing days at UU.  Basically you just saved the contents of "show ip route" and you could replay that using the tool.  Man I wish I saved that tool somewhere, it was incredibly valuable.

You might be able find someone out there that still has this tool.  And please get me an extra copy if you do manage to find it ;)

Stefan Fouant, CISSP, JNCIE-M/T
www.shortestpathfirst.net
GPG Key ID: 0xB5E3803D