XORP is production quality in terms of its functionality. The XORP shell doesn't work very well, and is "touchy" when trying to interactively configure it.
We script the generation of the "config.boot" file, and boot XORP directly off the pre-written configuration, rather than trying to configure it through the XORP shell. We have not had any major stability or performance issues as a result. To my knowledge, there are no other open source projects that correctly support multicast. The closest is the pimd project for Quagga, but it was very limited in its functionality last time I checked (only supports SSM for example). The syntax of the XORP CLI is similar to what you would see from Juniper. The majority of network engineers can intuitively make use of it; bugs aside. I don't think it needs to be re-written to mirror Cisco. It just needs to be cleaned up. Perhaps by someone who would find value in such functionality. On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 2:51 PM, frank hu <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks Ben for the kind help! > > I did use the debuggers to look into the core dumps. However, I expected > xorp to be reasonably stable and such core dumps to happen only > occasionally. From what I can see, the features XORP multicast routing > engine offers are pretty nice -- not too complex but good enough for even a > lot enterprise users. However, the software suite doesn't seem mature enough > to be bundled in industrial grade network devices. > > Just some comment, if XORP also targets outside the academia community, its > overall configuration mechanism should be designed to be intuitive for Cisco > IOS users for the simple reason that most router admins are much familiar > with Cisco IOS CLIs. For example, why a multicast routing admin (of XORP) > needs to manually add register_vif interface? The software suite needs to do > that under the hood, instead of having the user do it. > > > I think that my assessment of XORP multicast routing will stop here. > > Also thanks a lot to Ray and everyone else that helped me through the issues > that I ran into -- I appreciate your time and your in-depth expertise in > XORP. > > Frank > > > On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 11:11 AM, Ben Greear <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On 12/08/2011 11:08 AM, frank hu wrote: >>> >>> >>> Hi, >>> I still need more help. >>> I rebooted my x86 box with xorp and restarted the xorp configuration from >>> scratch. I configured PIM over the interface "vlan300" and IGMP over >>> "vlan800" and >>> committed the configurations. It went well. Then I tried to add >>> plumbing/mfea4 and also the PIM register interface "register_vif". >>> Unfortunately it failed at >>> this step. >> >> >> Look for core files and errors in the xorp logs. If you find cores, use >> gdb to get >> a backtrace (compile with debugging symbols if you haven't already). >> >> Use 'ulimit -c unlimited' before starting xorp_rtrmgr if it is crashing >> and >> not dumping core files. >> >> Thanks, >> Ben >> >> >>> So the critical process "xorp_rtrmgr" was gone, along with "xorp_pim" and >>> "xorp_igmp". >>> It seems that a configuration change triggered the above to happen. >> >> >> >> -- >> Ben Greear <[email protected]> >> Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com >> > -- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/ _______________________________________________ Xorp-hackers mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ICSI.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/xorp-hackers
