NEW Tool Announcement

labovit at MERIT.EDU labovit at MERIT.EDU
Wed Sep 6 14:59:05 UTC 1995



MRT-1.0-ALPHA README
Last updated 9/6/95

The first official alpha release of the Multi-threaded Routing Toolkit
(MRT) tools is now available: 

 (SunOS)    ftp://ftp.merit.net/net-research/mrt/mrt-1.0.alpha.sunos.tar.gz
 (Solaris)  ftp://ftp.merit.net/net-research/mrt/mrt-1.0.alpha.solaris.tar.gz

For more information on the MRT toolkit, see:

   http://www.merit.net/net-research/mrt/mrt.html

MRT is an easy-to-use, extensible platform for developing and debugging
routing protocols and routing code.  MRT's Unix programs and C-library
routines separate routing into its key component pieces of routing
protocol, routing engine, and routing policy services.  The MRT tools
greatly improve the ability of network providers to monitor, troubleshoot,
and analyze networks, and provide protocol developers or researchers with
a useful vehicle for quick prototyping and experimentation. 

You can use MRT tools to: 

--Capture a BGP peering session and monitor it in real time
--Input a binary file to the routing stream to replicate a problem or
  create any desired routing condition
--Use a real-time dump to perform statistical analyses, prototype a
  new protocol, or test a routing engine
--Record and replay sequences of events, in order to reproduce
  scenarios such as routing failures
--Collect routing statistics and analyze route flapping

The Alpha release contains the following tools:

* SBGP 
     A simple BGP4 speaker and listener

* Route_BtoA 
     Convert binary MRT messages to ASCII

* Route_AtoB 
     Convert ASCII descriptions of MRT messages to binary

* CiscoBGP 
     Check cisco routing tables against IRR

* BGPCheck 
     Check BGP updates against IRR

* Route_Flap 
     Perform route flap analysis and statistics collection



1.0 ALPHA RELEASE NOTES
-----------------------
1.  This is an ALPHA release. The code is still a bit buggy and 
    unstable. Depending on the number of bugs that turn up, we hope
    to make a BETA release available in late October. 
2.  MRT was designed to run on native kernel-level multi-threaded
    machines. If you run MRT on older machines, you will not achieve 
    nearly the same level of performance. In addition, some MRT features
    will not work. 
3.  The complete set of MRT programming libraries and documentation 
    will be released with MRT-1.0 BETA in late October.
4.  MRS, XMRS, SRIp, PortMapper and MSGServer are included in this
    release as undocumented, unsupported prototypes.




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