Thu Feb 16, 2006 10:35 pm
I am just really getting frustrated with it. I put together a lab setup with 4 routers last night trying to prove my theory and it didn't work, and I keep trying to no avail. I have spent more time (money) on this than if I had just bought a Cisco to do the same functionality. Of course I will admit, I love Mikrotik, it's a great product, and it really functions much better than any other router that we have tried in our network to get this functionality out of.
Anyway, back to the point. I had the debug logging turned on and it was working well. I could see each BGP connection attempt with no issues. The lab setup was based on all Mikrotik RB532s as they were more readily available in my testing. I set this up initially with 5 routers, and once I discovered where the flaw was, I was able to make it work with 4 routers the same way. The biggest issue is that this is not a BS/testing/development issue -- this is a production issue. We need to get BGP working with this as we are capping out what our primary provider is handing to us, and they have much better bandwidth than our secondary Cogent (yuck!) link. Obviously with this in mind we want to have all of our traffic on the highest cost network just because it gets where it needs to go.
Now that I have made an even more garbled mess, here is my exact setup:
(RouterName) (ASN)
Internet 1000
BGPEDGE 2000
DIST N/A
CUST 3000
I have set up Internet and BGPEDGE to talk to each other, and they are passing routes. As can clearly be seen here, they are not multihop. However, BGPEDGE and CUST must link to each other. This is where the problem is coming into play. I am able to telnet from each router to each router on port 179 and I do achieve the connection. I am even able to see both routers trying to link to each other but they are not. The way I understand it in my lab setup, router DIST does not need to be set up for anything except static routes. This imitates exactly what is handed off to us by our premium bandwidth provider -- they have 2 incoming links from Tier 1 providers and they run into their BGP edge router, then they use a distribution router that everybody within the data center connects to, and then they hand it off to us from there. That way they have better management over what traffic is going through their systems.
So the problem that occurs is that the first routers link, but the second routers don't. Running the standard BGP I get it to link and it will show the routes, but then it says the destination is unknown in the routing tables. The routing-test package doesn't announce anything at all, from what I can tell, and it looks like it's not even creating the link.
Are you located in the US? Do you have any way to be contacted via IM, phone, etc? I would like to speak with you on your schedule and see what can be done to get this corrected, if possible.