Route Monitoring: Status
Participants: SWITCH, DANTE, CESNET, GRNET, SURFnet, CERN
Goals
- Study tools that provide programmatic support for monitoring exterior (BGP) routing with respect to specified routing policies, as well as for generating router configuration from policy specifications automatically.
- Evaluate some of the existing software tools such as MERIT's RAToolset and MRT for these purposes.
Work done so far
DANTE have set up a single test account for the experiment on ws2.ch.ten-155.net.
A few software packages have been downloaded to ws2 but could not be installed yet because no C++ development environment was available.
Next Steps
(May-August 1999)
- Acquire more input from participants about the kinds of support they expect from such systems.
- Document the collected ideas, application desiderata, implementation experience etc., in an easily accessible way.
- Install software packages, in particular the latest releases of RAToolset, IRRd, and MRT.
- Configure "read-only" BGP peerings to one or more TEN-155 routers, so that live routing information is available for analysis.
- Create a test environment where the other participants can experiment with the system, too.
- Conduct specific tests of the installed software packages. The tests should be based on requirements that have been identified in previous stages. The tests should study the feasibility of an intended application based on the test setup. It should be attempted to generalise this to other environments, including estimation of scaling properties.
- Write down the findings of the tests in the form of a report outlining route monitoring applications, usage scenarios, limitations, and available tools.
Infrastructure Requirements
There are no specific requirements at the network level.
Some cooperation with DANTE is necessary to define a convenient way for multiple participants to experiment on the experimental workstation which is acceptable for DANTE from a security point of view.
Cooperation from DANTE is also required to install more software packages, either because this requires more privileges or because pre-required software (such as a C++ compiler and libraries) are missing.
Unidirectional BGP "peerings" should be set up between TEN-155 production routers and the software on the test WS, so that live routing information becomes available for analysis.