Large scale deployment ?

[Martin Mares]

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 at 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!