Question about bird RS config with BGP Community support

Job Snijders job at instituut.net
Tue Jul 24 18:29:38 UTC 2018


On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 11:36:21PM +0530, Anurag Bhatia wrote:
> Thanks a lot for your advice. I was aware of IXP Manager and there
> were certain issues we faced due to which we couldn't use it when we
> tried last time (which was a few months ago before the latest stable
> release). I wish to re-visit and keep on re-visiting it until we can
> make it work because it does seem like a package full of everything an
> IXP needs. :)
> 
> I checked arouteseerver project which I missed during the previous
> lookup.  It seems really good and I ended up in building config and
> getting it live.  For now, we got what we needed (the BGP community
> support as well as a way to automatically update config regularly). I
> will explore IXP manager again in the very near future.

Note that you can use arouteserver in conjunction with IXP Manager:
arouteserver can plug into IXP Manager so that you use IXP Manager for
the administrative side of things (the portal, statistics, etc), and use
arouteserver for the routeserver configuration generation.

Arouteserver (compared to IXP Manager) offers a bunch of more advanced
features such as "Use RPKI ROAs as route-objects", the "ARIN-WHOIS" data
source, and some extra filters/features. Both are excellent, it is good
to have a choice :-)

> Thanks again for your help. And oh btw I still do not have an answer
> to my question on why route announcement did not go.

Feel free to send me your full BIRD configuration off-list and I'll help
you analyse what's wrong in the adoption of that example config.

> I do have a well tested and working config which does the job but the
> config generated by arouteserver is like 10x bigger than original
> config (for 5 peers).  Still trying to read and get a sense from it on
> what was wrong earlier.

The arouteserver (or ixp manager) configurations are indeed bigger, most
likely due to extensive prefix and as_path filtering! This is a good
thing. Don't worry about size - I've loaded 50 megabyte config files
into BIRD and it handles such large configurations fine.

Kind regards,

Job



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