Building a BGP test network

[Jason Lewis]

I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a full route
table on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to use Quagga
and insert a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's
possible. (I've pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)

So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test
network a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think someone
has done it and I'm just not searching for the right things.

Thanks,

jas

[Beavis]

Jas,

hi check this thread, you might be able to talk with the same guy.

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/maillists/archives/routing-wg/1999/msg00107.html



goodluck,
-b

I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a full route table
on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to use Quagga and insert
a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's possible. (I've
pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)
So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test network
a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think someone has done it
and I'm just not searching for the right things.
Thanks,
jas

[Jason Lewis]

I should clarify that my test network is not connected to the Internet
or any other network. I would normally just peer and get the table, but
I don't have that ability. I'm open to anything that could act like a
BGP router where I could feed it an existing RIB.

Post by Jason Lewis
I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a full route
table on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to use Quagga
and insert a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's
possible. (I've pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)
So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test
network a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think
someone has done it and I'm just not searching for the right things.
Thanks,
jas

[Borchers, Mark M.]

Do you have access to an Adtech or equivalent tester? Our AX4000 has the ability to fake a routing table. Just give it a range of prefixes and a range of prefix-lengths.

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2008 9:55 AM
To: NANOG list
Subject: Re: Building a BGP test network
I should clarify that my test network is not connected to the Internet
or any other network. I would normally just peer and get the
table, but
I don't have that ability. I'm open to anything that could act like a
BGP router where I could feed it an existing RIB.

Post by Jason Lewis
I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a

full route

Post by Jason Lewis
table on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to

use Quagga

Post by Jason Lewis
and insert a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's
possible. (I've pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)
So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test
network a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think
someone has done it and I'm just not searching for the right things.
Thanks,
jas

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[Howard Jones]

Post by Jason Lewis
I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a full route
table on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to use Quagga
and insert a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's
possible. (I've pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)
So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test
network a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think
someone has done it and I'm just not searching for the right things.

I've done this in the (distant) past by taking the output from 'show ip
route' from one of our live transit routers, and awking it into a load
of 'route add' commands on a spare FreeBSD box. Run quagga on that, and
hook it into your test network. I needed to change some sysctl
parameters to allow for that many routes though - and that was when it
was 90K routes, not 230K :-)

You can do similar things in perl with Net::BGP, without bothering the
host system's routing table, too.

H

[Ariel Biener]

Post by Howard Jones
I've done this in the (distant) past by taking the output from 'show ip
route' from one of our live transit routers, and awking it into a load
of 'route add' commands on a spare FreeBSD box. Run quagga on that, and
hook it into your test network. I needed to change some sysctl
parameters to allow for that many routes though - and that was when it
was 90K routes, not 230K :-)

I might be missing something, but this is not emulating the real thing,
since all the AS paths are gone, aren't they ? All the natural BGP environment
is also gone, since show ip route will only show the route that ended up
in the RIB, while show ip bgp might show a few paths to a route, with
one of them being best.

I have been pondering over this issue for some time now (not too much
time to invest on it), since I wanted to created a duplicate model of our
production network in a test environment, not connected to any outside
network (thus cannot peer, same problem as described here).


--Ariel
--
Ariel Biener
e-mail: ***@post.tau.ac.il
PGP: http://www.tau.ac.il/~ariel/pgp.html

[William Waites]

Post by Ariel Biener
I have been pondering over this issue for some time now (not too much
time to invest on it), since I wanted to created a duplicate model of our
production network in a test environment, not connected to any outside
network (thus cannot peer, same problem as described here).

What about http://ipmon.sprint.com/pyrt/ ?

It doesn't do everything being designed for the reverse problem --
pulling routes from a live BGP network for analysis. But it does
include a BGP speaker and the ability to read and write MRTD files. I
imagine with relatively little work it could be coaxed to read an MRTD
dump and send the entries to a test peer.

-w

[Richard Mortier]

Post by William Waites

Post by Ariel Biener
I have been pondering over this issue for some time now (not too much
time to invest on it), since I wanted to created a duplicate model of our
production network in a test environment, not connected to any outside
network (thus cannot peer, same problem as described here).

What about http://ipmon.sprint.com/pyrt/ ?
It doesn't do everything being designed for the reverse problem --
pulling routes from a live BGP network for analysis. But it does
include a BGP speaker and the ability to read and write MRTD files.
I imagine with relatively little work it could be coaxed to read an
MRTD dump and send the entries to a test peer.

hi;

as the author of pyrt, i'd just like to say that extending it to act
as a bgp speaker able to read an MRTD file in and push it out down a
peering as a series of updates ought indeed to be straightforward.
it used to be able to read routeviews and ris BGP update and rib
dumps ca. 2001/2002 as i used them for testing before we got the live
feeds from sprintlink setup; it's possible that new attributes and
suchlike might mean that it has problems with current dumps, but that
ought to be similarly easy to fix. let me know if you run into any
problems with pyrt and i'll see what i can do to help!

(i'm just pleased that someone might still want to use the code :)

Cheers,
--
Richard Mortier
Technical Director, Vipadia Ltd.,
Systems and networking consulting, integration and development; voice
and video messaging on IP
***@vipadia.com

[Charles N Wyble]

Post by Jason Lewis
I'm building a BGP test network and I'd like to replicate a full route
table on a few of my routers. I thought I might be able to use Quagga
and insert a rib dump, but I'm not finding a lot of info on if it's
possible. (I've pinged the quagga list and didn't get any response)
So my question is, is it possible to feed a router on a private test
network a full route table from a RIB snapshot? I have to think
someone has done it and I'm just not searching for the right things.

Well first of all do you have a rib dump? If not see
http://routeviews.org/ for source material.

Specifically

http://archive.routeviews.org/ and ftp://archive.routeviews.org/

As for inserting it into Quagga, I'm not sure how to go about doing
that. Various google searches don't turn anything up.

I was planning on looking into this problem in a few weeks anyway. I'm
building a network test bed and having full BGP tables is a part of my
testing.

When I figure it out I'll post to the list unless its figured out before
then.