Bring UCI and LUCI configuration for Bird4/6 to improve integration with OpenWRT

[Ondrej Zajicek]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 12:05:39PM +0200, Eloi Carbó Solé wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I am Eloi Carbó, a student from the UPC in Catalonia, doing a Google Summer
> of Code [0] with the QMP project [1] team, and the support of Guifi.net [2]
> and BMX6 [3] developers and under the scope of Freifunk [4].
> 
> I would like to inform you that we are bringing UCI and LUCI configuration
> support to Bird4 (now) and Bird6 (ASAP) putting our efforts on BGP routing.

Hello

It would be nice to have UCI configuration in OpenWRT for BIRD. Although
I am not sure how filters could be usefully represented in UCI and these
are pretty important in most nontrivial BGP configs.

I would suggest to keep structure of UCI BIRD configs consistent with
native BIRD configs. Although BIRD sometimes uses multiple nesting and i
am not sure whether UCI can represent that. Also, please use same option
names (when possible) with underscore separator for space instead of
camelCase (e.g. scan_time instead of scanTime). That would be consistent
with both UCI style and BIRD style.


Some comments to /etc/config/bird4:

config bird 'bird'
    option useUCIconfig '0'
	#Caution! Enabling this option, Bird will translate this
	#UCI file and use it instead of /etc/bird4.conf
    option UCIconfigFile '/tmp/bird4.conf'

Perhaps '/var/etc/bird4.conf' as default ?


config global 'global'
    option logFile '/tmp/bird.log'

Default configuration should probably use syslog instead of logfile.

    option log 'all'
    option debug 'all'

'debug all' is not a good default value. That would generate tons of log
messages.

    option table 'arf'

'table' should not be a global option, more like one section for each table
(although there is just one option 'sorted' and tables currently do not
have block for options in BIRD config, but that will change in the future).


config kernel kernel1
    option tablePriority '100'

This is misnomer. It is not a table priority, just a kernel table ID.


config device device1
    option scanTime '10'
    #list primaryIface 'eth0:192.168.1.1'
    #list primary '192.168.0.0/16'

You may ignore 'primary' device option. It is mostly deprecated and not
much useful.


config bgp bgp1
    option table 'arf'
    option import 'all'
    option export 'all'
    option as '65001'
    option disabled '0'

config neighbor
    option type 'bgp'
    option instance 'bgp1'
    option addr '172.16.1.5'
    option as '65530'

In BIRD, we don't have separate neighbors as subsections of BGP. We have
one BGP instance per neighbor (also with separate protocol name). UCI
structure should probably reflect that too. If you want common options
for multiple BGP neighbors, you could use protocol templates for BGP:

config bgp_template bgp_common
    option table 'arf'
    option import 'all'
    option export 'all'
    option locas_address '172.16.1.1'
    option local_as '65001'

config bgp bgp1
    option template 'bgp_common'
    option neighbor_address '172.16.1.5'
    option neighbor_as '65530'


config route
    option instance 'static1'
    option type 'general'
    option addr '192.168.9.0/24'
    list via '10.99.105.159'

Perhaps not use 'list' but 'option' for 'via' in this case.
Type should be 'router' which should be default type.

option 'addr' should be named 'prefix' instead.


config route 
    option instance 'static1'
    option type 'special'
    option addr '192.168.2.0/24'
    option attribute 'unreachable'

It is unnecessary to use separate 'attribute' option. You could use
'unreachable', 'blackhole' and 'prohibit' as route types.


config route
    option instance 'static1'
    option type 'multipath'
    option addr '192.168.30.0/24'
    list via '172.16.1.5'
    list via '172.16.1.6'
    list viaWeight '172.16.1.2:70'

Weight attribute is probably not important enough to implement it with
such ugly syntax.


For /etc/init.d/bird4, please use 'case' instead of 'if/elif' sequences.


-- 
Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo

Ondrej 'Santiago' Zajicek (email: santiago at crfreenet.org)
OpenPGP encrypted e-mails preferred (KeyID 0x11DEADC3, wwwkeys.pgp.net)
"To err is human -- to blame it on a computer is even more so."
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