Hi!
I would like to ask on whether bird is actually used in medium-sized production environments and what the experiences are, with regard to stability and possibilities for debugging, especially on the OSPF and BGP parts.
About stability: OS interface, BIRD core and BGP should be pretty stable, OSPF is a fairly complex thing to debug, so although Ondrej is putting a lot of effort to fixing its bugs, it should be reasonable stable, but not production quality.
Since I am only learning said more complex routing protocols (until now everything that needed to be done could be handled with static routing or RIP) I wonder if BIRD is a good platform to use. Compared to eg. Cisco or Zebra, the possibilities of getting BGP status information (paths etc) seem to be rather limited.
They seem, but they aren't :-) "show route all" should dump everything known about all the routes.
Anyone running BGP on a network consisting of more than just a single box, and running full internet tables ?
Yes, sometimes me :-) Not in production environment, just for testing and amusement on my home network
How How does BIRD do there, since route dampening is on the todo, and the books describe it as a very important feature for an internet grade BGP router ?
For a large transit site, it surely is, but for any site providing no transit traffic and only importing other's routes and exporting its own network statically (which is a fairly common setup), it isn't needed at all.
Interoperability with other vendors tested ?
For all protocols: tested with Cisco and GateD.
Or any other suggestions ? (Replies to this question please in private, as I dont want to start any flame wars here)
As a co-author of BIRD, I hope I'll not have to wear asbestos, but I think the only routing deamon comparable with BIRD is Zebra -- it has many features BIRD lacks and has undergone much more testing, anyway I think BIRD is better designed and offers a very powerful configuration and filtering language (while Zebra is mimicking almost all brain damaged stuff in Cisco). Have a nice fortnight -- Martin `MJ' Mares <mj@ucw.cz> http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mj/ Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Rep., Earth Don't forget to save the Earth! We don't have any backups!