Mikrotik BGP Question

Martin List-Petersen martin at airwire.ie
Fri May 21 21:56:11 UTC 2010


On 21/05/10 13:39, Bret Clark wrote:
> On 05/21/2010 08:23 AM, Nick Hilliard wrote:
>> I will refrain from making any smart-ass comments about Mikrotik and BGP,
>> but no: there is no reason whatever that you can't take your internet
>> feeds
>> from different locations, so long as you have a good quality interior
>> network link between those two locations, and your two routers talk
>> iBGP to
>> each other.  Just make sure your boxes have enough RAM to cope with a
>> full
>> dfz feed.
>>
>> I.e. it's just the same as using any other router in this regard.
>>
>> Nick
>>
>>    
> I've used Mikrotiks for everything except BGP, but we don't use
> Mikrotiks for BGP only because we already had BGP on a different
> platform...personally, when it comes to BGP, I think people are better
> off running it on devices they are familiar with rather then trying to
> learn the idiosyncrasies of a new platform.

While Mikrotik's BGP implementation isn't very sofisticated, there is no
reason, why you can't have your feeds in different places. As Nick
outlined, you need to set iBGP up between the boxes.

I'm running myself a ISP on mainly Mikrotik basis (basestations and
clients, approx 2500 users) and I've been extensively testing Mikrotik's
BGP stack in the last 4 years (from 2.9 and up).

Mikrotik wrote the whole routing stack from scratch in 3.x, which
resultet in tons of problems and bugs. In my opinion, it still isn't
where it should be. Don't get me wrong, but there are several pitfalls.

- Mikrotik still has some memory leaks in the BGP stack somewhere,
causing funny issues at times.

- Filters aren't adequate for my use, and lacking a lot on IPv4, but
even more on IPv4.

First of all, you will need at least a RB1000, RB1100 or a PC based
Mikrotik router to get enough ram, to accomodate one full-table or more.
Anything less and you can forget it.

I'm running a mix of Quagga boxes, Cisco and recently Juniper instead
for BGP. For our internal routing OSPF on Mikrotik definatly does the job.

Just my 2c.

Kind regards,
Martin List-Petersen
-- 
Airwire - Ag Nascadh Pobail an Iarthair
http://www.airwire.ie
Phone: 091-865 968




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