Yesterday we finished integrating Phyber’s new public Route Server (rotue-server.phyber.com) with our Los Angeles infrastructure. Route Servers are excellent network troubleshooting tools for both internal engineers as well as external customers and users. It’s obviously a much safer to troubleshoot, test and experiment on a non-critical route server vs. a core router in your network.
The route server is running on a Cisco 7204vxr with a NPE-300 and 256MB of Ram. We chose the Cisco 7204 over other alternatives (Zebra, Quagga, OpenBGPd, etc…) for a few reasons, the main one’s being:
- Phyber runs an end to end Cisco based network. So it’s easier for our engineers to use a Cisco based route server for troubleshooting.
- We had an extra 7204vxr in storage, so adding 128MB of Ram to support a full BGP feed wasn’t a big deal.
The open source alternatives are all excellent choices and will run on minimal hardware. The selection process is ultimately what is best in your network environment. Because we already had the equipment cost was not a factor in this process. Honestly I would imagine if this box receives significant usage we would most likely move to something Unix based before spending the money to upgrade to a larger processor.
The configuration is extremely simple…
service timestamps debug datetimeservice timestamps log datetimeservice password-encryption!ip subnet-zeroip multicast-routing!interface FastEthernet0/0no ip redirects!router bgp <ASN>bgp log-neighbor-changesbgp dampeningno auto-summaryno syncneighbor mcast-ebgp peer-group nlri unicast multicastneighbor mcast-ebgp ebgp-multihop 255neighbor mcast-ebgp update-source FastEthernet0/0neighbor mcast-ebgp next-hop-selfneighbor mcast-ebgp distribute-list 100 outneighbor mcast-ebgp route-map set-nexthop in!neighbor <peer ip> remote-as <peer AS>neighbor <peer ip> peer-group mcast-ebgpneighbor <peer ip> description <peer name>!ip classlessip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 <default-gw>ip route <peer ip> 255.255.255.255 <default-gw>no ip http serverip bgp-community new-format!access-list 100 deny ip any any!route-map set-nexthop permit 10set ip next-hop peer-address!line vty 0 4session-timeout 20 outputexec-timeout 5 0timeout login response 0logging synchronousno login!line vty 5 15session-timeout 20 outputexec-timeout 5 0timeout login response 0logging synchronousno login!ntp server 164.67.62.194ntp server 192.12.19.20endIf you need help examples for various routers are available here: http://www.routeviews.org/config.html
