Setting Up a Looking Glass

Sat Jun 13 20:55:32 UTC 2015

On Sat, Jun 13, 2015 at 03:39:13PM -0500, Theodore Baschak wrote:
> If you want/need BGP, OpenBSD + OpenBGPD (with their bgplg
> cgi/restricted shell) is fairly easy to set up. You mesh the looking
> glass in like any other router in your system, and it gives you full
> visibility. I wrote a how-to that you can basically copy and paste
> into a new 1vCPU/1GB vRAM OpenBSD VM which a lot of people have found
> helpful in setting this type of thing up:
> https://ciscodude.net/2014/05/14/openbsd-5-dot-5-bgplg/

Cool, thanks.

> Similar to what I’ve written about with OpenBSD, you could also peer a
> system running BIRD (not announcing anything) into your network, and
> run ulg.py (https://github.com/tmshlvck/ulg

Another BIRD based looking glass which is nice is "bird-lg"
https://github.com/sileht/bird-lg/ - bird-lg makes it easy to deal with
multiple routers and do lookups in parallel.

I have an instance running here for the AS199036 NLNOG RING route
collector: http://lg.ring.nlnog.net/prefix_detail/lg01/ipv4?q=www.nanog.org
(or the nice bgp_map view:
http://lg.ring.nlnog.net/prefix_bgpmap/lg01/ipv6?q=www.nanog.org )

In the past I've set up a VM w/ BIRD next to each important router, have
the router send a full table to the BIRD instance, and use bird-lg to
aggregate lookup access to all those views. This way we didn't need to
expose direct access to the PEs themselves. 

Kind regards,

Job