Feature requests

[Ask Bjørn Hansen]

On May 16, 2011, at 12:59, Ondrej Zajicek wrote:

> VRRP:
> Maybe. Is there any advantage if it is integrated in routing daemon
> (instead of using independent VRRP daemon)? I would guess that there
> isn't any interaction between VRRP and routing, but i don't have any
> experience with VRRP.

We often use it (vrrp or the BSD version "carp") on routers so "dumb hosts" can have a default route that always works.   I agree though that it's not really related to the routing stuff per-se.

> BGP peer group:
> What exactly this should solve? If just common defaults, then i think
> that with common filters and copy/paste in editor (or config file
> generated by a script) there is not a real reason for peer groups. But
> perhaps some generic tool for sharing common defaults would be a good
> idea.

The bird configuration is so powerful that it seems like an odd omission.   We use vyatta on some of routers (which is basically a linux distribution and configuration system for various tools including quagga).   They don't have peer-group support for IPv6 peers (yet) and the "copy-paste" stuff is really error-prone.

On the IPv4 peers we just have ASN, description and peer IP with the occasional override -- almost impossible to make a mistake.   On the IPv6 peers we have a dozen lines of configuration; each an opportunity to mess up and unless we add comments it's easy to lose track of what's configured as it is because it's our default on the IX and what's specific to the peer.

In other words: Peer groups are really useful.  :-)  Maybe at the "route-server scale" you all generate the configuration files from a database or some such anyway; but at smaller scale it's nice to have those "tools" built-in.


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