High-availability BGP with BIRD

[Andre Nathan]

Hi Thomas

I'm not a BGP expert but I run a similar configuration. Some notes below.

On 08/21/2013 10:08 PM, Thomas Johnson wrote:

> In this scenario, router-a and router-b are running FreeBSD, with CARP
> to provide a virtual IP for failover. The two routers act in a
> failover manner, with router-b taking over the virtual IP upon failure
> of router-a. The goal is to maintain the fast failover (seconds) that
> I get from CARP in non-BGP configurations. I am wondering if the
> following method is a common/feasible/best solution.

I do it here exactly like this, but with Linux and keepalived.

> If router-a fails.
> * Programmatically update the router-b BIRD config to begin
> advertising prefixes.
> * router-b already has the BGP table in memory, so routing can resume
> immediately.

Not sure if I understood this correctly, but if both routers have BIRD
running you shouldn't need to do any manual configuration changes. As
long as your machines have the routers' virtual IP as their gateway,
routing should resume as soon as the address is transferred to the
remaining router.

> Is there a better way to achieve this? Will my ISP laugh at me when I
> ask them to assign me a /29, and allow me to run two BGP sessions?

You should also consider that ISP routers can fail. Imagine that
router-a has a BGP session with isp-router-a and router-b with
isp-router-b. Now consider what happens if isp-router-a fails.

To keep things working, I configured an iBGP session between router-a
and router-b. In the example about, traffic would be routed out of your
network through the router-a -> router-b -> isp-router-b path.

I'm also interested to learn about possible alternative architectures to
handle these cases.

Cheers,
Andre