Dear Eric,

You could configure the BIRD instances as 'listen only' or 'passive', that way they will not attempt to make outbound TCP connections. The other peer must not be configured as passive, otherwise they will never establish a BGP session. If you do this you could use any TCP load balancing mechanism to distribute the connections amongst the BIRD processes (haproxy / iptables / etc).

Kind regards,

Job

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:05 AM, Eric Cables <ecables@gmail.com> wrote:

Is it possible to run BIRD in a speaker-only only mode, such that it does not bind to a local TCP socket, for the BGP protocol? While i can bind BIRD to different TCP ports at start-up, many vendors do not support specifying a destination port other than tcp/179.

I'd like to run multiple instances of BIRD on a single server, each instance peering with 1-4 peers. The goal is to distribute BIRD across multiple cores, improving the number of queries per second to BIRD's control socket.

I apologize if this has already been discussed, but an initial search of the archives did not yield a similar request.

-- Eric Cables