Large scale deployment ?

[Mario Lorenz]

Hi there,

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.

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. Anyone running BGP on a network consisting of
more than just a single box, and running full internet tables ? 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 ?


OSPF I couldnt test at all, bird just crashes right after startup
(probably my config file describes an invalid configuration). Again, can BIRD
be recommended as a routing solution for single area OSPF networks, around
20-30 Routers ? Scaling for more areas? 
Interoperability with other vendors tested ?

Again, the idea for me is to learn the routing protocols, on a practical
example; I dont have 20 Ciscos to play with, and bird looked like a nice
little daemon for that job (and also for future deployment, if it works..)

Or any other suggestions ? (Replies to this question please in private, as I
dont want to start any flame wars here)

Regards,

Mario

-- 
Mario Lorenz                            Internet:    <ml at vdazone.org>
                                        Ham Radio:   DL5MLO at OK0PKL.#BOH.CZE.EU
Trust the computer industry to shorten "Year 2000" to Y2K.  It was this kind
of thinking that caused the problem in the first place.