Looking glasses with programmatic interface?

Wed Jan 23 19:52:28 UTC 2002

### On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 14:39:45 -0500, "Deepak Jain" <deepak at ai.net>
### casually decided to expound upon "Vincent Gillet" <vgi at zoreil.com>,
### "Stephane Bortzmeyer" <bortzmeyer at gitoyen.net> the following thoughts
### about "RE: Looking glasses with programmatic interface?":

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

I did something similar to this by hacking rsd to not export any learned
routes, peered it with several border and core routers and then dumped the
routing table once every 15 minutes into a program which reformatted it into
RPSL objects that was then imported into irrd as a database.  I used the
source field to specify the router it was seen from.  One could then query
irrd for routes using whois.  And one could also use the different search
commands to get routes by AS, router, etc...

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

Or one could create an automated network health monitoring system that
tracks path changes...  Check out what Caimis did.

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