[safnog] Freeware/Open Source Software Routers

[Mark Tinka]

On 8/May/15 13:53, Graham Beneke wrote:
> A few people have suggested to me that my flavour of *nix or *bsd mixed
> with my preference of bird or quagga makes for a good software based
> router. I've worked with various combinations like this for various
> purposes and always found the configuration a little disjointed and
> cumbersome - lacking the kind of single config file that we've become
> used to on *insert big name vendor*.
>
> Can anyone share experiences on deploying any of the numerous software
> based routing platforms. Particularly those that support things like
> VLANs/sub-interfaces, dynamic routing (OSPF and BGP) and IPv6.

We run Quagga/Zebra on FreeBSD to enable Anycast for DNS, NTP, e.t.c.

For us, that is as far as we shall go for open source routing code
because we do not find it quite ready for more in a commercial network.
But that is just for us, as I know various other networks (and exchange
points) around the world actually use this commercially.

A bit disappointing that IS-IS in Quagga/Zebra has been very poorly
implemented, and that has not changed since I started testing this back
in 2011. So we use OSPFv2/OSPFv3 for Anycast, and redistribute that into
our IS-IS core.

Our deployment has been stable, except for some updates they made two
revisions ago (March, I believe) that broke IPv6 in OSPFv3. Luckily,
they fixed that in April, so happy days.

I have not ran BGP on Quagga/Zebra, so can't comment on that.

Mark.