next up previous
Next: Final Setup Up: Routing Information Service Previous: Introduction

Prototype Setup

 

 figure118

In order to prove the concept and to get a feeling for the data volumes involved, a prototype of the RIS has been developed and has been used for data collection during the last months.

The setup of the prototype is shown in figure 2 and consists of a route-collector, a database and a rudimentary user-interface.

We tested two products as route-collector software: GNU-Zebra [8] (versions 0.74 and 0.76, under the Linux operating system) and the Multi Threaded Routing toolkit (MRT) [9] (versions 1.4.xa and 2.0.0a under the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems).

GNU-Zebra is a free software package that manages TCP/IP based routing protocols. It supports the BGP-4 protocol [4] as well as RIPv1, RIPv2 and OSPFv2. GNU-Zebra can be used with both IPv4 and IPv6. Zebra is intended be used as a Route Server and Route Reflector.

The Multi-threaded Routing Toolkit (MRT) is a project developed by Merit at the University of Michigan, to be used for routing architecture and protocol research. Software developed until now includes multi-protocol IPv4/IPv6 routing daemons as well as routing analysis and simulation tools.

At peak times, the route collector may have to deal with 70,000 prefix updates per second. The prototype shows that the route collectors can keep up with these these loads, however, the database is a point of concern. These studies show that generic database systems have problems coping with these numbers. The best solution at the moment seems to be store the data in regular files and only use a generic database product to maintain a summary file indicating which information is stored in which file. However, further studies are needed here.

The Multi-hop BGP4 peering mode has been tested with the prototype. This mode can be used to reduce the number of collection points.

The RIPE NCC is happy to make the software of the prototype available to interested parties [10]. However, the software will be made available on an ``as-is'' basis and the RIPE NCC, unfortunately, does not have the resources to provide more than basic installation support.

The conclusion that can be drawn from this prototype is that it is possible to collect routing information from routers using BGP. It also gave us a good idea of the data volumes involved. This experience will be used in the final design. Data collection with dedicated machines at remote points has not yet been tested but no special problems in this respect are foreseen.

 figure129
Figure:   Overview of the final RIS setup.


next up previous
Next: Final Setup Up: Routing Information Service Previous: Introduction

Henk Uijterwaal
Thu Oct 14 13:53:27 MEST 1999