BGP tables, PC hardware, et al.

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

From my (operational) experience:

CPU load to import a full table from ground zero, on router hardware: 100%
     "" "" "" "" , on server hardware: <2%

Main problem with using server hardware (and I am not talking about a Linux
box on a Taiwanese manufacturer, here; I'm talking hardware considered by
the majority of successful businesses to be stable enough to support their
core applications): Lack of stable and useable routing software.

Zebra: OSPF is twitchy, BGP is either great or takes > 1 hour to converge
a full table, with no clear reason why, and it does not support anything
but Linux/Intel sanely, yet.

GateD public: No reflector code. End of story.

GateD private: Segfaults & other fun games, unresponsive support, closed
code.

MRTD: (As far as I can tell) requires injection of full routing table into
kernel routes for base OS, no sane way to turn this off, support for
non-BGP protocols is spotty at best.

Anyone able to significantly disprove one of the above, or provide another
package that does not have the problems, would have my deep and abiding
gratitude, because this issue is rather active in my current work-life.

2

Maybe im just lucky but the only problems ive had with zebra so far is
with equal cost multipath. Everything else works great.

-Dan

3

On Linux/Intel, it works fairly well.

On Solaris/Sparc, it does well to compile. At all. Much less run. Much less
run stably.

4

Zebra: OSPF is twitchy, BGP is either great or takes > 1 hour to converge
a full table, with no clear reason why, and it does not support anything
but Linux/Intel sanely, yet.

I'm running Zebra on a Netra AC-200 (Solaris 8) with 256MB RAM with a couple
BGP peers. Zebra doesn't claim to support Solaris but it works fine.

I'll give you that it's slow and don't do anything in Solaris that will show
you the routing table (either 'sh bgp ro' or 'netstat -nr') - Solaris seems
to have an issue displaying 110k routes.

- mz

5

mrtd has been out of development for quite a while now, actually.

But iirc, you could disable injection of routes via the -n flag.

-j

MRTD: (As far as I can tell) requires injection of full routing table into
kernel routes for base OS, no sane way to turn this off, support for
non-BGP protocols is spotty at best.

---end quoted text---

6

Zebra: OSPF is twitchy, BGP is either great or takes > 1 hour to converge
a full table, with no clear reason why, and it does not support anything
but Linux/Intel sanely, yet.

No real problems on OpenBSD/i386. Very nice with Tyan Thunder KT7 based
boards.

Looking forward to the current round of peer-group code going in.

You want commercially supported BGP, but Cisco/Juniper/whatever. You want
free - use the source, Luke.

Peter

7

Like for every other free software system, there are probably companies which
do commercial support for Zebra. And, if nobody does it yet, my company will
probably start doing it soon :slight_smile:

Last minute: there is at least one company doing so. See
<http://www.zebra.org/faq.html>.

8

Zebra: OSPF is twitchy, BGP is either great or takes > 1 hour to converge
a full table,

Never seen that.

with no clear reason why, and it does not support anything
but Linux/Intel sanely, yet.

I use Zebra only on Linux/Intel, so it does not bother me. But I know
personnally several people who run it happily on FreeBSD/Intel and the Zebra
mailing list clearly show that most Zebraers seem to prefer *BSD to run it.