Non-Routing BGP Speakers

Fri Apr 28 02:49:34 UTC 1995

In message <m0s4eEt-000OXcC at jazzie.com>, Sean Shapira writes:
> RFC 1771 says in part:
>    The hosts executing the Border Gateway Protocol need not be routers.
>    A non-routing host could exchange routing information with routers
>    via EGP or even an interior routing protocol.  That non-routing host
>    could then use BGP to exchange routing information with a border
>    router in another Autonomous System.  The implications and
>    applications of this architecture are for further study.
> 
> Would anyone be willing to share their experiences with (or thoughts
> about) this approach?  Given that 64 MB of RAM for routing tables
> woudl cost only around $2,000, this seems like a totally sensible way 
> to build a small, multi-homed AS.  Will finding a vendor-supported 
> system for this be ... difficult?  (I'm not exactly sure whether a 
> BSD box running Cornell GateD counts as "vendor-supported".  ;-)
> 
> -- 
> Sean Shapira         sds at jazzie.com         +1 206 443 2028
>  <a href="http://www.jazzie.com/sds/">Sean's Home Page</a> 
>                Serving the Net since 1990.                 

BSDI works and comes with gated, though not the latest.  The Riscom-N2
is supported by BSDI and can give you 2 56k or even T1 lines speaking
Cisco HDLC or PPP.  I can't say I've ever tried it, but some people
say it would all work fine.  You could also take a subset of full
routing since you probably won't be doing transit between major
providers.

We have hosts running gated to gather routing statistics.  Our routers
are also running gated.  They are RS6ks running custom interfaces and
a modified AIX kernel.  64MB RAM works for us.  Many of our machines
have 32 MB of RAM.

PSC runs DEC Alphas with gated.  This is a supported but expensive
option.  Handy if you have a Cray and don't want a wimpy router in
your FDDI path.  Avoid sys5 based stuff like Solaris and SGI Irix
since it can't do CIDR routes and barfs badly on overlapped routes.
Probably HP too.  That leave DEC OSF and AIX.  You could probably go
with NetBSD on an older Sun.  For PCs there is BSDI, FreeBSD, Linx.

If you can afford to be dual homed, you probably can afford a router
rather than a PC serving as a router.  I'd love to hear how things go
if you go with BSDI.  There is also an Emerging Technologies T1/56k
card that claims ISDN LAPB, FR, X.25, Cisco HDLC, PPP and which sounds
great on paper but I haven't heard any user testimonials yet.

Curtis