Will “In fact it may not have enough RAM and CPU to effectively deal with a modern full table”
Its impressive to be able to get to a Linux shell from the Arista command prompt, but as you say, under the bonnet there may not be much vroom vroom. Not sure what “good” is in terms of timing for ingesting the full table. Thanks John From: Will Hargrave <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2023 9:46 PM To: John P Bourke <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [uknof] Full table routers Hi John, Why not simply accept fewer routes (plus a default) into the existing Arista EOS BGP and so the hardware FIB? Then you can actually take advantage of the hardware forwarding. With this setup you’re using the relatively slow control plane (the Intel FM6000 was released a decade ago and I can’t imagine Arista paired it with a super-fast SoC…) to route and that won’t work very quickly at all. In fact it may not have enough RAM and CPU to effectively deal with a modern full table, it would be better to just use a modern 1U server for this. Will On 28 Jun 2023, at 21:21, John P Bourke wrote: Hi I may have “an” answer. I think the Americans call this a “Hail Mary Pass”. I have a bunch Arista 7150s, which are EOL and a disappointment. But I found this. https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2015/10/01/hacking-arista-appliances-for-fun-and-profit/#comments The Arista runs a full Centos 7.6. You strip out the Arista BGP process and BIRD (or FRR I guess) and you have a route server. I say route server, because by pulling the Arista BGP process you have no interaction with the RIB. Thanks John BTW – Not dissing Arista. The 7150 is a bit of a unicorn in their portfolio, using a chipset from Intel which they bought from a startup, which Intel then dropped so Arista understandably did not put a lot of effort into beyond the High Frequency Trading use cases that this low latency switch is good for. From: Tim Bray <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2023 6:56 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [uknof] Full table routers On 28/06/2023 10:27, John P Bourke wrote: Any recommendations for full table routers. We don’t need more than 10G. I used Debian + FRR on HP proliants. With startech Nics with intel chipset. Unusual, but did the trick. Help that there was a whole stack of the same hardware running services in the same place. They take a while to boot, but you can make it faster and I think the newer variants are better. Software wise, takes a bit of getting used to. Sometimes conflict between FRR and what Debian wants to do for network setup. Also you can use CAKE :) Also run any scripts or monitoring you want onboard (like counting the BFD flaps per hour to watch the problems that go away and come back very quickly) See also distributions that bundle FRR more specifically for networking rather than a general distribution. -- Tim Bray Huddersfield, GB [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> +44 7966479015
