exabgp v4.2.18 releases: BGP swiss army knife of networking
ExaBGP provides a convenient way to implement Software Defined Networking by transforming BGP messages into friendly plain text or JSON, which can then be easily handled by simple scripts or your BSS/OSS.
It is routinely used to improve service resilience and provide protection against network or service failures. For example, thanks to the healthcheck backend included, anycasted DNS service failures can be detected and handled gracefully. To help you get started, Vincent Bernat put forward a full lab explaining how to best use this feature.
Also, alone or in conjunction with fastnetmon, it provides network operators a cost-effective DDOS protection solution.
But it is not its only strength, thanks to modern routers’ flow balancing, ExaBGP can also be used to save you money on load balancers. Other uses include keeping an eye on network changes done by RIPE or by other networks with GIXLG.
Who is using ExaBGP?
Some users have documented their use cases, such as DailyMotion or Facebook.
These organisations have spoken of, or are using/have used ExaBGP: AMS-IX, Alcatel Lucent, BBC, Blablacar, Cisco Systems, Cloudflare, Dailymotion, Facebook, MaxCDN, Microsoft, OpenDNS, Oracle, PowerDNS, RIPE NCC, …
Features
RFC support includes ASN4, IPv6, MPLS, VPLS, Flow, Graceful Restart, Enhanced Route Refresh, and AIGP among others. More information can be found here
ExaBGP does not perform any FIB manipulation. If this is what you need, you may consider another open source BGP daemon such as BIRD or Quagga.
RFC compliance details the latest developments.
Changelog v4.2.18
This release only adds the ICMP experimental code.
It was created to provide a PGP signed tag as some organisations require it.
Installation
The program is packaged for Debian, Ubuntu, ArchLinux, Gentoo, Mint, FreeBSD, OSX, and OmniOS (and probably more).
The latest version is available on pypi, the Python Package Index
pip install exabgp
> exabgp –help
> python -m exabgp healthcheck –help
It is also possible to download the latest archive from github
curl -L https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp/archive/4.0.5.tar.gz | tar zx
> ./exabgp-4.0.5/sbin/exabgp –help
> ./bin/healthcheck –help
If using git, for production deployment, please use the “3.4` branch.
git clone https://github.com/Exa-Networks/exabgp.git
> git checkout 3.4
> ./bin/healthcheck –help
Multiple versions can be used simultaneously without conflict when ExaBGP is running from extracted archives and/or local git repositories.
The configuration file and the API format change from time to time, but every effort being made to make sure backward compatibility is kept.
ExaBGP 4.0 and later are targeting python3 when ExaBGP 3.4 and previous versions are python2 applications. At the moment, it is possible to run ExaBGP 4.0 using python2.7 but this backward compatibility should not be relied upon.
Python BGP route injector
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Copyright (c) 2009-2017, Thomas Mangin
Copyright (c) 2014-2017, Nikita Shirokov
Copyright (c) 2014-2017, Orange
Copyright (c) 2015-2017, Alcatel-Lucent
Copyright (c) 2016-2017, Job Snijders
Copyright (c) 2016-2017, Evelio Vila
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