BGP with OpenBGPd.

[Charles Sprickman]

On Tue, 14 Apr 2009, Steve Bertrand wrote:

> Charles Sprickman wrote:
>
>> I've been toying with the idea of replacing an aging Cisco with either a
>> used Juniper box or a PC running *BSD.  Everytime I look at Quagga or
>> Zebra, I'm not impressed.  They both sound quite buggy...
>
> We've been using Quagga (zebra, ospfd, ospf6d, bgpd) for quite some time
> (due to CLI consistency with Cisco as someone else stated).
>
> I don't understand how they "sound" buggy. What exactly are you
> referring to? Which pieces are you concerned with?

I'm probably reading too much pro-OpenBSD stuff. :)  On the OpenBGPd/OSPFd 
pages there are a good number of technical presentations where they 
explain how their design diverged from the existing open source routing 
daemons.

I also occasionally peruse some WISP forums, and have seen some horror 
stories in there, since those guys rely very heavily on homebrew hardware.

> All we did was light up a couple of Quagga boxes in the lab, and load
> them up so it replicates our production environment. No problems, we
> went to production. We test anything new in the lab, and then roll it
> out if it is stable.
>
> I've yet to find a bug. Every time I think I've found something, it has
> come down to a simple inconsistency between how I'd do the same thing on
> a Cisco IOS.

That's understandable, and something I'd also have to deal with on a used 
Juniper.  FWIW, I can grab loaded M20s for about $6K each.  It's very hard 
to say no at that price.

>> How many folks here are doing routing on a PC platform?  These days
>> almost all the links we need to support are ethernet, with our DSL stuff
>> being the one exception (ATM OC-3).
>
> We run ~1/2 of our routers on FBSD based hardware that run from either
> USB thumb stick, or CF/SD cards.

Stock FreeBSD or do you pare it down?  How do you handle upgrades? 
Install on another flash card and just reboot to the new card?

> As for your OC3's:
>
> http://www.prosum.net/atm155_E.html

Wow.  Those list for what looks like under $1K US.  Impressive.  Our DSL 
provider is actually going to be moving from giving us an OC-3 for 
customer backhaul to a GigE handoff.  Details of how this works are still 
murky though - if they're going to do a VLAN for each customer, I'd think 
they'd run out of VLANs before running out of bandwidth...

Thanks for you input...  I appreciate it.

Charles

> Cheers,
>
> Steve
>