New user, initial question

[Florian Lohoff]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2000 at 11:27:44AM +0100, Michael Renzmann wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> I just want to introduce myself as a new bird user here on the list and have
> an initial question: how stable is the RIP module of the current bird release?
> I would like to use bird as routing daemon within one product we are
> developing. We used zebra since a few months, but there have been some
> problems with it that couln't be solved, and as the time is getting shorter
> and shorter (we have to start tests soon) I started looking around for another
> routing daemon. So I came around to bird (via freshmeat) and was impressed by
> the good documentation (at least the few parts I have read by now are good...
> :)) ) and would like to start working with the bird now.

I didnt like zebra because of the multiple deamon approach. This might
be easier to track down bugs and better do debuggin but when i say
"Dynamic Routing" i dont want to start another 10 daemons each listing
on its own port for configuration. My experience with zebra
is 1-2 years old and this might have changed since then but i like bird.

> The product I work on is a router for wireless networks running under Linux in
> an (slightly) embedded system. We use RIPv2 for the beginning, but would also
> like to enable them to use OSPF in one of the next steps. Current protocol is
> IPv4, IPv6 will also come in a later step.
> 
> Is there anything I should pay attention for when using the RIPv2 part of
> bird? Any pitfalls, stability problems, ...? Is there a mailing list archive
> available?

Go for it - I have seen memory leaks in 1.0.0 and on - They definitly
got smaller - I am using RipV2 and i probably got ~120 routes 
around. The memory leaks definitly got smaller with 1.0.4 or
probably completely disappeared. 

root      5231  0.0  0.5 15788  644 ?        S    Sep06  54:49 /usr/sbin/bird

This is 15MB VSZ with 644K RSS which means its using a lot less
than allocated and i dont think its working set once grew
to 15MB as there are not that much changes.

I havent monitored memory usage although i should do this (no problem
with snmpd and mrtg).

Beside the tiny, not so clear memory leak, i havent had time to debug, 
the RipV2 part is ROCKsolid.

Ah - just short idea - birdc and do a 

"dump resources" and immediatly the bird catches up on the memory

mgr1:~# ps auxww | grep bird
root      5231  0.0 11.6 15804 14804 ?       S    Sep06  54:49 /usr/sbin/bird

But i didnt get the resource dump as bird is showing this on the console
which is redirected to /dev/null - What about dumping to /var/run/bird.dump
or something like bind/named does. Would enable people running this
as a daemon in the background to get resource/* information after a long
period of time when running in background ...

Flo
-- 
Florian Lohoff                  flo at rfc822.org             +49-5201-669912
     Why is it called "common sense" when nobody seems to have any?