Hey All,

I'm using 2.9.5 with routing-test and i have 3 routers running in the following

Tower0-----Tower1--------Tower2

Tower0 is 172.16.10.5/30
Tower1 is 172.16.10.6/30 AND 172.16.10.9/30
Tower2 is 172.16.10.10/30

I've setup BGP so each tower is AS=6540X and they peer up like so

Tower0-Tower1
Tower1-Tower2

The routes are shown in /ip route print ok but if i dont set Tower2 to "redistribute-connected=yes" then i cant access Tower2 from Tower0 - Tower1 has "redistribute-other-bgp=yes" set so i belive Tower1 should be passing on the BGP routes from Tower2 to Tower0

Is anyone able to tell me where i have gone wrong?

Hello, McFly - is there anyone home?!

BGP is used at your borders, typically to advertise to your upstream providers the availabillity of routes to destinations within your network, and for you to receive information about the availabillity of routes out to the Internet. It's an EXTERIOR GATEWAY protocol, as opposed to an INTERIOR GATEWAY protocol, such as rip or ospf. Unless you have a definate routing policy and archetecture and specfic goals in mind, you're probbly going to be much better of not messing with any of this as you'll end of wasting lots of time and not getting anywhere, or anything of value out of it for your trouble.

I have a completely routed network (as opposed to a bridged one), and I use OSPF on key towers to provide routing redundancy (eg: have a selection of paths between the towers with automatic failover in the case of a network path becomming unavailable... like if a backhaul link dies for any reason). This enables me to survive equipment failure and continue providing uninterrupted service and is why I do it. Many other networks, particularly where you are small and/or inexperienced, can make do just fine with static routing and you can build big networks with just static routes and not worry too much about it. It's just when you're ready to make that next step and become reliable and resilient that you want to consider dynamic routing.

Hi,

thanks for that info, i will look into OSPF routing today. The main reason i ask is that i would like to get a good idea of BGP issues with routeros before i attach one to our IX exchange.

Thanks for the help

We also are looking into adding BGP to the level3/cogent connection we have. Is anyone running BGP with full route tables on 2.9? Wondering how much RAM is needed and should it be split out onto another box or is performance not an issue with a supermicro p4 3ghz machine.

Thx,
Sam

I know some people are running full table BGP on 256 MB/1+GHz machines.

The router will be kinda slow for a couple of minutes after sync. But otherwise it's OK.

For a critical infrastructure would it be better to place BGP on a separate MT box ?

Sam

IMHO it would be better to setup two identical boxes + VRRP + some scripts. YMMV

Hi

I run border router on 2.8.26, celeron 2.2 GHZ, 512 ram, here is utilization:

system resource> pr
uptime: 3d7h9m42s
free-memory: 336728 kB
total-memory: 516556 kB
cpu: Intel(R)
cpu-frequency: 2261 MHz
cpu-load: 17
free-hdd-space: 28171 kB
total-hdd-space: 60604 kB
write-sect-since-reboot: 24442
write-sect-total: 590886


I have loaded whole bgp table from our transit operator, about 160k routes + about 1k routes from local peering (about 80 peers).

I tried to move it on new machine with 2.9.5 and routing-test, but I was not succesfull due to problems discussed here:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=4133

When starting it took about 2 minutes of 100% CPU utilization until the bgp table is loaded.

I recommened separate machine for bgp and basic routing to the internal network. I would like to use the scenario as Eugene wrote, but still don't have enough courage... Because it's productive system.

dusan - thank you for your post. I like to see real world examples of how this is being used. I'm thinking a separate box that does routing only is an option that might work best for us. Adds a hop but maybe better for stability.

Sam