On Nov 20, 2009, at 16:17 , Ondrej Zajicek wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 02:19:05PM +0100, Wolfgang Hennerbichler wrote:
>> Fellow Bird Users, 
>> 
>> Now I realized that if I changed the definition for 'allnet' and do a
>> 'configure soft' these routes that are added or removed to 'allnet' are
>> not rejected or added, because it seems that there is no bgp soft
>> reconfiguration taking place (it works if I trigger a soft
>> reconfiguration outbound on the peer router, or if I restart the
>> protocol which causes bgp to flap).
> 
> BGP soft reconfiguration is not implemented. 'configure soft' just
> means 'ignore changes in filters'. So you have to restart the
> protocol or do the filtering in the pipe protocol, like in nix.cz.

hm. I feared this, and I have to say this is not optimal. 

> BTW, why do you want to filter routes in BGP protocols and not in
> pipes? I see just one problem with pipe setting - increase in
> memory consumption if peers would send too many unwanted routes.
> But this might be mitigated by 'route limit' option.

well, this is because our concept differs from the one of nic.cz. We filter at 
the border, and build pipes to every neighbor who has decided to peer. See this 
illustration I've made for the last euro-ix: http://tiny.wogri.at/PP (red is 
the filters, the arcs are the pipes). This means we have no "main" rib. This is 
good in certain ways: 

1) we have a web-interface for setting up the route-server - every peering 
coordinator can decide who to peer with by simply clicking around like crazy
2) we don't need to fiddle with bgp communities which pose a big question mark 
once 4 byte AS-Numbers are here
3) ISP's who have less understanding of the subject just need to peer with the 
route-servers and click around
4) we save memory by just exporting routes to the ribs that need it. 

there are a couple of more advantages to that concept, the main advantage, and 
the point that everybody likes is the webinterface and the super-simple setup 
at client-side. 

So one way I see to solve this problem is to build a second table per peer and 
apply the filter to a pipe that transports routes from one table to the other, 
but to be honest, I refuse to do that, this would be a bad and memory-wasting 
concept. The other workaround would be to bring the protocol down and up again, 
and rely on the second route-server to stay up and running. This puts 
unnecessary load on all peering devices and I think this is not great either. 
The 'route limit' thing is something I am not too fond of either, because I 
never know in advance how many routes a peer will announce, and this needs 
constant manual attention. 

> I probably look at the soft reconfiguration in near future, but
> i am not sure how problematic would be to implement it.

I have no idea how complicated this would be, but to be honest if you want bird 
to compete with other route-servers - and to make me and a whole 
neighbouring-country including most of the ISP's in that country happy :) - I 
think you really should consider looking into it. Also given that other 
Internet Exchanges are considering BIRD as a good alternative I think your 
effort would soon turn out to be valuable not only to a small country like 
Austria, but you are on the way to conquer the whole world (well, that's a 
little exaggerated, but it gives you the idea :))!  
I would really appreciate if you could look into that, and be sure, you're not 
only doing this for us, many people will use this soon. I am willing to help 
you testing as good as I can. Let me know what you think! 

Wolfgang

> -- 
> Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo
> 
> Ondrej 'SanTiago' Zajicek (email: santi...@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."

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