On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 07:51:21AM +1100, bird21@sensation.net.au wrote:
Hi all,
If I do several consecutive "show route" queries, the timestamp keeps changing back and forth, by about a second. Example:
0.0.0.0/0 via x.x.x.x on em2.100 [aapt 05:20:28] * (100) [AS2764i] 0.0.0.0/0 via x.x.x.x on em2.100 [aapt 05:20:28] * (100) [AS2764i] 0.0.0.0/0 via x.x.x.x on em2.100 [aapt 05:20:27] * (100) [AS2764i] 0.0.0.0/0 via x.x.x.x on em2.100 [aapt 05:20:28] * (100) [AS2764i]
I notice (via public route servers) that Quagga and FRRouting seem to do the same thing. Example:
Last update: Thu Nov 25 18:20:31 2021 Last update: Thu Nov 25 18:20:30 2021 Last update: Thu Nov 25 18:20:30 2021 Last update: Thu Nov 25 18:20:31 2021
Does Bird do this in order emulate some convention (like perhaps something Cisco has done for decades), or is there some other reason it's displaying an inconsistent timestamp?
Hi The reason is that the timestamp is stored in monotonic time and is recomputed to wall-clock time during printing, and all these computations are done with precision of seconds, so the difference between monotonic time and wall-clock time is sometimes rounded down, sometimes up. In BIRD 2.0, time computations use microsecond precision (while printed values are rounded to milliseconds), so these rounding effects are much less visible.
I have a script that compares the md5 of the current output with the previous minute to decide whether to log the routing table, but because of this quirk the md5 changes almost every time...
You could use sed expression to remove the timestamp. We use something similar in our testing setup to normalize output to canonical format to see whether we get the same result as expected. -- Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago@crfreenet.org) OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net) "To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."