Best Linux (or BSD) hosted BGP?

Thu May 11 04:50:45 UTC 2023

On 5/10/23 15:55, Tom Beecher wrote:

>  That could just as easily happen today. Every OS release has all 
> kinds of changes to defaults, and frequently don't get caught until 
> they break something. Even if today's FreeBSD defaults worked for this 
> scenario, the next release could change to a value that doesn't.

We implement a lot of user-defined changes to FreeBSD defaults via 
"/etc/sysctl.conf", as an example, whose unexpected change would not 
necessarily break anything as they would reduce scaled performance. We 
can live with that, because we can afford a reduction in performance 
until the fault is found, not an outright outage.

The problem with doing this with something like a routing protocol - and 
in this specific case with FRR on FreeBSD for IS-IS - is that it would 
not be a reduction in performance if an unexpected change were to find 
its way into future revisions of FreeBSD... it would, in all likelihood, 
be a complete outage. That is a steeper price to pay, for us anyway.

It's just about weighing the risks for one's particular operating 
environment, and for us, that risk is too high for a routing protocol.

Mark.