[45198] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: state of the art in router configuration
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jennifer Rexford)
Mon Jan 21 23:53:19 2002
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002 21:09:37 -0500 (EST)
Message-Id: <200201220209.VAA94693@chips.research.att.com>
From: Jennifer Rexford <jrex@research.att.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
Ratul,
> 1. how do most operators configure their bgp (text editor or some
> high-level configuration tool)?
I think this varies a lot depending on the network and the type of
configuration change being made. Some folks work directly at the
command-line interface (perhaps with some cut-and-paste from previous
configs, especially for boiler-plate stuff), some use GUIs provided by
router vendors for some types of config changes, others use their own
scripts, and still others might use third-party commercial products
like Orchestream or Goldwiretech.
> 2. are there "configuration checkers" out there that would check whether
> an operator has not made a common error while modifying configuration?
For this, you might be interested in the paper
http://www.research.att.com/~jrex/papers/ieeenet01.ps
that appeared in IEEE Network Magazine in Sept/Oct 2001. The paper
describes a checker that looks for inconsistencies within and across
routers in an AS, by parsing and analyzing router configuration files.
-- Jen
