Cisco Route Server Configuration

Yesterday we finished integrating Phyber’s new public Route Server (rotue-server.phyber.com) with our Los Angeles infrastructure. Route Servers are excellent network troubleshooting tools for both internal engineers as well as external customers and users. It’s obviously a much safer to troubleshoot, test and experiment on a non-critical route server vs. a core router in your network.

The route server is running on a Cisco 7204vxr with a NPE-300 and 256MB of Ram. We chose the Cisco 7204 over other alternatives (Zebra, Quagga, OpenBGPd, etc…) for a few reasons, the main one’s being:

• Phyber runs an end to end Cisco based network. So it’s easier for our engineers to use a Cisco based route server for troubleshooting.

• We had an extra 7204vxr in storage, so adding 128MB of Ram to support a full BGP feed wasn’t a big deal.

The open source alternatives are all excellent choices and will run on minimal hardware. The selection process is ultimately what is best in your network environment. Because we already had the equipment cost was not a factor in this process. Honestly I would imagine if this box receives significant usage we would most likely move to something Unix based before spending the money to upgrade to a larger processor.

The configuration is extremely simple…

service timestamps debug datetime
service timestamps log datetime
service password-encryption
!
ip subnet-zero
ip multicast-routing
!
interface FastEthernet0/0
 no ip redirects
!
router bgp <ASN>
 bgp log-neighbor-changes
 bgp dampening
 no auto-summary
 no sync
 neighbor mcast-ebgp peer-group nlri unicast multicast
 neighbor mcast-ebgp ebgp-multihop 255
 neighbor mcast-ebgp update-source FastEthernet0/0
 neighbor mcast-ebgp next-hop-self
 neighbor mcast-ebgp distribute-list 100 out
 neighbor mcast-ebgp route-map set-nexthop in
 !
 neighbor <peer ip> remote-as <peer AS>
 neighbor <peer ip> peer-group mcast-ebgp
 neighbor <peer ip> description <peer name>
!
ip classless
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 <default-gw>
ip route <peer ip> 255.255.255.255 <default-gw>
no ip http server
ip bgp-community new-format
!
access-list 100 deny   ip any any
!
route-map set-nexthop permit 10
 set ip next-hop peer-address
!
line vty 0 4
 session-timeout 20  output
 exec-timeout 5 0
 timeout login response 0
 logging synchronous
 no login 
!
line vty 5 15
 session-timeout 20  output
 exec-timeout 5 0
 timeout login response 0
 logging synchronous
 no login 
!
ntp server 164.67.62.194
ntp server 192.12.19.20
end

If you need help examples for various routers are available here: http://www.routeviews.org/config.html