stability of bird

[Roberto Moreda]

I've found two issues a few weeks, when we started to use bird as
routing daemon on a network on >15 routers talking OSPF and
RIP:

	- segmentation faults using OSPF: try to modify the MTU
	  of an interface used on the OSPF protocol :-). This issue is
	  solved apliying the trivial patch that I sent a few weeks
	  ago to the list. No comments by developers side... but
	  "it works for me (TM)".

	- in daemon mode, bird doesn't detach from ttys... so it can
	  cause problems when closing ttys (this issue is also
	  commented in other email without feedback). I have another
	  trivial patch that works for me.

	- in a few situations bird began to exchange a *lot* of OSPF
	  traffic with some peers (a permanent loop of request-update-ack)
	  saturating links between two router. In this situation the
	  only solution was to restart bird. No solution by now. It is
	  very frustrating try to achieve redundancy and find out that
	  two routers are sucking all the bandwith exchanging OSPF
	  traffic :-/

I suppose that summertime is bad for active developing, so I hope that
with the return of holidays bird will get a new and better release :-)

Greets

	Rober


On Aug/13/2005, Martin Kraus wrote:
> hi,
>   i've got stability issues with bird. i talked with feela, he told me there
> are some problems with stability, that bird crashes once in about 3 weeks, 
> however, tonight it crashed on me about 5 times and finaly tore down my central 
> router, which, needless to say, really #@&!!@??#@!!*&# annoyed me:)
> 
> is anyone using successfully bird in production environment at least on a small network
> (what i need for now is really just two routers running bird, two routers running
> gated and couple of other routers throught static routing) or are these
> stability issues affecting everyone?
> what i remember is that bird crashed hard when using 
> show route filter { if net ~ .... etc. through birdc, than it crashed when adding a
> static route and configure/restart static1. 
> i also noticed, that the ospf module just stops sending out helo packets from
> time to time, and only thing that helps is a complete restart of bird.
> 
> i didn't have time to simulate the errors and see when and what exactly does
> it do. i'm also no programmer, i saw debugger once 5 years ago so i'm not much
> help there either. 
> i would just like to know if there is a way to get bird working reliably to some 
> extent or if it's still just beta for fun only. 
> 
> have a nice weekend
> martin kraus

-- 
Roberto Moreda
Allenta Consulting
UNIX, Linux & Security Services