Looking glasses with programmatic interface?

Wed Jan 23 19:39:45 UTC 2002

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Vincent Gillet
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 4:46 AM
To: Stephane Bortzmeyer
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Looking glasses with programmatic interface?

Hi Stephane,

> I'm surprised to see that every looking glass I know is only reachable via
an
> interface made for humans, not for programs. When you want to query the LG
via
>  a program (for instance to monitor your routes on a distant LG), you need
to
> emulate an human being and parse HTML (or sometimes Cisco text) replies.

Public looking glass are for humans.
I do not want my looking-glass being heavily loaded by cron tool.

looking-glass use router CPU and i do not want to see a foolish guy to
put a :

* * * * *

Crontab  ...

Route-server is a solution to have load CPU router.

Vincent.
-----

This raises a good point. Since most LGs are running on a dedicated web
server somewhere inside of a network, one could very easily install zebra on
this webserver with a read-only BGP image from several internal routers [say
all the borders]. This has two benefits: a) Queries do not bog down
production routers in fact the load is linear, and b) The LG tool only need
look at localhost for all answers. This only costs 120mb of RAM per view and
saves network overhead to boot.

Traceroutes may need to still go out to the end router, but I doubt anyone
would allow a query to those in an automated fashion.

Deepak Jain
AiNET