Getting a BGP table in to a lab

Fri Apr 22 03:22:05 UTC 2005

Nathan Ward wrote:

>I'm trying to come up with a way to get a full BGP routing table in to
>my lab.
>I'm not really fussed about keeping it up to date, so a snapshot is fine.
>At the moment, I'm thinking about spending a few hours hacking together
>a BGP daemon in perl to peer with and record a table from a production
>router, disconnect, and then start peering with lab routers.
>
>Am I reinventing a wheel here?
>  
>
Alexander Tudor tells me:

<snip>
The simplest way to load up your favorite router with a bgp table is to:

a. get a bgp trace file (obtainable from routeviews.org or ripe.net -ris
or pch.net)
b. get route_btoa from ripe.net (standard tool for reading a bgp trace
file, updates or full tables)
c. download the mrtd.net toolkit ( do not use its route_btoa)
d. read carefully documentation on sbgp program contained within mrtd
package
e. pipe output from route_btoa (from ripe.net) into sbgp (who should
peer with your router and load up the table)

It takes a bit of time to set up but it works.
</snip>

According to the documentation, "sbgp" can create these trace files too,
so I can create traces applicable to my network.
I'm not sure if it'll handle MP-BGP though..

Thanks Alexander.