Monitoring BGP Feeds

Two weeks! I can't believe it has been that long since my last post. That's just crazy!

I know that I can't make it up to you but I will share something I just finished up.

BGP is cool. It is so cool to turn it up on a new router and see the entire internet's routing table with a simple command "sh ip bgp". What's cooler than that?

Feeding that table into a database, that's what!

Putting your BGP feed into a database enables all sorts of cool things. As a matter of fact, some of these are so cool I haven't even thought of them yet! For the last hour or so I've been busy working on getting this going. Here's what you will need:

- BGP feed from an upstream provider, connected to a router
- Linux machine running Quagga
- Linux machine with Perl installed (can be same machine as Quagga, mine is)

First you will need to configure your router with BGP enabled:

en

conf t

ip as-path access-list 1 deny .*

router bgp [your ASN]
neighbor [Quagga IP] remote-as 64512
neighbor [Quagga IP] transport connection-mode passive
neighbor [Quagga IP] description Quagga peer
neighbor [Quagga IP] filter-list 1 in


You will want to make sure that this machine is directly connected. If it isn't you need multihop BGP (which I won't cover right now). Here's what we're doing:

- The as-path with deny updates from your Quagga machine. We don't want some misconfiguration to actually affect your network. We just want some routes from the Cisco!

- Create the neighbor with remote-as 64512 (private ASN)

- Don't initiate a connection to this peer, let them connect to us (passive)

- Apply the filter-list to inbound traffic for this neighbor (don't allow updates from Quagga)

Now we need to configure Quagga. First, you will need to install it. Your distribution should have some packages for you. Use yum, apt, etc to grab it.

It will probably install some config files in /etc/quagga. We only want to setup bgp. This should be a good sample bgpd.conf to get you started:

hostname [your hostname]
password changeme
enable password changeme
log stdout
log syslog
service advanced-vty
!
router bgp 64512
bgp router-id [Quagga IP]
neighbor [Cisco IP] remote-as [your real ASN]
neighbor [Cisco IP] description Internet BGP Feed
neighbor 127.0.0.1 remote-as 64512
neighbor 127.0.0.1 description local db hookup
neighbor 127.0.0.1 port 9179
neighbor 127.0.0.1 passive
neighbor 127.0.0.1 filter-list 1 in
neighbor 127.0.0.1 next-hop-self
neighbor [some public ip] remote-as 64513
neighbor [some public ip] description Remote devel
neighbor [some public ip] passive
neighbor [some public ip] ebgp-multihop 255
neighbor [some public ip] filter-list 1 in
neighbor [some public ip] next-hop-self
!
access-list 1 permit [local class C network] 0.0.0.255
access-list 1 permit 127.0.0.1
access-list 1 deny any
access-list 10 permit [local class C network] 0.0.0.255
access-list 10 permit [remote ip]
access-list 10 deny any
!
ip as-path access-list 1 deny .*
!
line vty
access-class 1


After you apply this, you will want to start bgpd: "bgpd -n". It will tell you which vty you can connect to with telnet:

telnet localhost 2605

That should work. At this point, you should have a connection up to your main router:

sh ip bgp sum
BGP router identifier (deleted), local AS number 64512
29 BGP AS-PATH entries
0 BGP community entries

Neighbor V AS MsgRcvd MsgSent TblVer InQ OutQ Up/Down State/PfxRcd
(deleted) 4 15092 580 129 0 0 0 02:06:29 9845
127.0.0.1 4 64512 167 944 0 0 0 00:58:59 0
(deleted) 4 64513 6 616 0 0 0 00:02:56 0

Total number of neighbors 3

Sweet! Hey, where did that connection from 127.0.0.1 come from? That looks strange...

That connection is the whole point of this exercise. Star2Star is interested in quality, internet routing and the relationship between the two (at least I am). Long ago we realized that having a full BGP feed and being able to analyze updates in real time could be a huge asset to our management and monitoring portfolio.

How could we do this? Within the last week it came up on NANOG. A guy named Bill Nash wrote a Perl script a while back using Net::BGP to connect to a BGP peer and dump it's routes into a MySQL database. This made much more sense than trying to pull them via SNMP or some other hackish mechanism.

Bill wrote this for another employer and no longer had access to it. Evidently enough people asked him about it off list for him to consider re-writing it. I wanted him to do more than consider... I wanted that script!

I contacted Bill and offered to support his work any way possible. This included setting up a read-only BGP feed for him. I didn't want to give him (no offense Bill) a direct connection to our Cisco router (crashing that would be BAD) so I came up with the setup above. The Quagga is read only (by configuration and with -n on the command line not even the local kernel can be updated). And the Cisco is read-only to the Quagga peer. Seems safe enough.

The Quagaa instance is merely a distributor for our BGP feed. That way I can mess with it all I want without any fear (or very little fear) of causing any problems for our main router. I can hammer it all I want with some alpha-quality perl scripts. Worst case (hopefully) I'll just hose Quagga if something goes wrong...

While waiting for Bill to get his Perl script going, I Googled BGP Perl to see if there was anything else out there. Sure enough, there is:

http://briangannon.com/2007/04/23/bgp-perl-route-analyzer/

This is a crude version of what I am looking for. I made a few minor changes because I needed it to run on the same machine as Quagga (already using TCP port 179). I also didn't want to have to run the perl script as root. Here is a mini-diff:

line 20:
-my $bgp = new Net::BGP::Process();
+my $bgp = new Net::BGP::Process( Port => 9179 );

Now when you follow the directions on Brian's blog to INSERT the BGP peer into the SQL table, make sure to just use localhost. Then the perl script will use port 9179 for itself. After all, if nothing needs to connect to it, who cares what the local port is (as long as the peer has been configured properly)? Quagga knows that peer 127.0.0.1 is on port 9179, and it works. Check this out:

6147167 | 4 | 216.134.176.0/22 | 2007-08-28 19:39:51 | 2 | Next Hop Changed,Metric Changed |
| 6147168 | 4 | 216.134.180.0/22 | 2007-08-28 19:39:51 | 2 | Next Hop Changed,Metric Changed |
| 6147169 | 4 | 216.85.83.0/24 | 2007-08-28 19:39:51 | 0 | Removal of network |
| 6147170 | 4 | 216.85.83.0/24 | 2007-08-28 19:39:57 | 1 | Added 216.85.83.0/24 |
| 6147171 | 4 | 216.85.83.0/24 | 2007-08-28 19:40:35 | 0 | Removal of network |
| 6147172 | 4 | 216.85.83.0/24 | 2007-08-28 19:41:22 | 1 | Added 216.85.83.0/24 |
| 6147173 | 4 | 207.250.244.0/23 | 2007-08-28 19:48:32 | 1 | Added 207.250.244.0/23

or the routes:

mysql> select * from route limit 9842,100;
+---------+-----------+------------------+-----------+--------+------------+---------------+
| id | router_id | prefix | next_hop | metric | local_pref | as_path |
+---------+-----------+------------------+-----------+--------+------------+---------------+
| 3045536 | 4 | 216.85.190.0/24 | 127.0.0.1 | | 100 | 15092 4323 |
| 3045638 | 4 | 198.102.2.0/24 | 127.0.0.1 | | 100 | 15092 4323 |
| 3045655 | 4 | 195.85.117.0/24 | 127.0.0.1 | | 100 | 15092 174 209 |
| 3045665 | 4 | 216.85.83.0/24 | 127.0.0.1 | 99999 | 100 | 15092 4323 |
| 3045666 | 4 | 207.250.244.0/23 | 127.0.0.1 | 99999 | 100 | 15092 4323 |
+---------+-----------+------------------+-----------+--------+------------+---------------+


That's from my MySQL db. Pretty cool, huh?

I'll be working more on this in the upcoming weeks. Bill will also be working on a much improved version of the BGP Perl script that I am working with now. I'll make sure to let everyone know how it goes!

Social Networking

As of today I rounded out my social networking portfolio.

A year ago I didn't belong to any of these "web 2.0"/"social networking" sites. First it was Orkut. I was in Brazil and it kept coming up. Why not? So I joined.

A couple months ago my friends in Sarasota, FL kept started really bothering me about MySpace. Why not? So I joined.

A couple of days ago I got enough LinkedIn invitations for me to break down and create an account.

Today I signed up for Facebook, much to my chagrin. I was already on three other sites, so why not?

I'll tell you why not. Now I am going to have people complaining about my outdated profiles, lack of interest, etc. Why create an account if you can't keep it up to date?

How am I supposed to maintain accounts on my personal/professional life spread across FOUR different social networking sites?!? This is madness. I can't wait to see what everything looks like in a few months...

So anyways if you are on any of these sites you should try to track me down to see how it all unfolds. I am sure it will be interesting!

Update!

I am still alive - barely.

I haven't been able to post over the last couple of weeks because Star2Star was busy getting another release out. We put out another release every six months (depending on schedule and delays) and you guessed it - it's that time of the year again.

Our latest release is 2.1. It includes a lot of fixes and feature improvements to the overall system, everything from Polycom firmware to OpenSER enhancements (lots of them).

Speaking of OpenSER, it looks like I will be working with it quite a bit over the next few weeks and months for the 2.2 release. I'll also have some interesting Cisco experiences, I'm sure...

So between getting this release out, a car accident, and regular life I have not had much time for this blog. Things should be getting back to normal pretty soon. I like it that way.