Calculator written in route-map

Hi all,

Do you often find yourself in need of a simple calculator, and all you have
available to you is a Brocade or Cisco IOS router? No longer will you
experience the horror and dread of mental arithmetics. The route-map calculator
is here!

Brocade : http://instituut.net/~job/calculator-route-map.brocade.txt
Cisco IOS : http://instituut.net/~job/calculator-route-map.ioscisco.txt
            (file size ~ 12 megabyte)

In general I don't find route-maps useful to accomplish, well, anything.
However, this is a striking example of re-usable configuration that has
a measurable impact on daily operations!

Calculations can be performed with integers between 1 and 256. The
answer will be presented as a rounded positive integer. In case the
calculation would result in a negative integer, larger than 2^16
(65536), an helpful error message is generated: 65000:7777. For
divisions and substractions the order of the BGP communities is
relevant, one must always place the operator first!

arithmetic operators:

  'add' operator community: 65000:1
  'multiply' operator community: 65000:2
  'substract' operator community: 65000:3
  'divide' operator community: 65000:4

example output:
    
  telnet@input-router#show ip bgp routes detail 10.1.1.1 | i COMMUNITIES
              COMMUNITIES: 65000:2 0:63 0:113 ! calculate 63 * 113
  telnet@input-router#

  telnet@calculator#show ip bgp routes detail 10.1.1.1 | i COMMUNITIES
              COMMUNITIES: 0:7119 ! result: 7119
  telnet@calculator#

Super convenient right?!

WARNING: due to IOS/Ironware architecture this route-map consumes quite
some memory. Always test in a lab before deploying in production!

Kind regards,

Job

Job,

Fun! More generally, BGP has the same computing power as a Turing Machine:

  Marco Chiesa, Luca Cittadini, Guiseppe Di Battista, Laurent Vanbever, and Stefano Vissicchio
  Using routers to build logic circuits: How powerful is BGP? (ICNP'13)
  http://vanbever.eu/pdfs/vanbever_turing_icnp_2013.pdf

-- Jen

Is this meant as a proof that we need better operators for doing stuff based on contents of bgp communities? Because I concur that this is needed!

Making it understand that "65000:65003" 65000:6500x" means take X and prepend your own ASn X times, and not have to do this explicitly.