Non-Routing BGP Speakers

Geert Jan de Groot GeertJan.deGroot at ripe.net
Fri Apr 28 10:01:11 UTC 1995


On Thu, 27 Apr 1995 22:49:34 -0400  Curtis Villamizar wrote:
> 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.

The RIPE NCC (AS3333) is using a BSDI box as BGP router, so that
definitely works. Make shure you get decent hardware; 
PC manufacturers sometimes cut corners and, for instance, I had
to disable the external cache on amsterdam.ripe.net to make the
box stable. We're not using serial cards as we were able to 
attach to the Amsterdam DMZ directly.
(and you can play doom on a PC; try that on a cisco ;-)

I have been thinking about Sean's idea of using gated as BGP
talker, and haveing only gated talk to the box switching packets.
The routes sent to the router can then be aggressively aggregated
only based on nexthop, because the router doesn't need more detailed
routing information. I haven't further investigated the idea, but
I think it might be possible to e.g. run CSC-3's with 'full' routing
this way (if in Europe, you prefer one carrier for US routes, 
then 198/7 might be possible...)
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to (test-)implement it.

Note that this might scale better than using router-CPU's; 
it is much more likely that the generic computer industry can 
scale up CPU's faster than dedicated router manufacturers can.

A disadvantage of this approach is that you are running something
different than the majority of BGP talkers, and there might be
incompatibilities. This quite clearly showed during the Danvers IETF
when someone inject ASpaths with 109 109 109 on the end;
this caused older gated's to shut down the peering and caused
quite some problems for those sites using gated.
We have upgraded our box since then; Curtis, have you had a chance
to look at this yet? It is a disaster waiting to happen again,
and next time the players might not be convienently located
in the same IETF terminal room...

Geert Jan



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