Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5
9cfd3f67f0
What other networks were told of rested on one thing: the Only to Customer mark that routes from providers, peers and route servers get as they come in. A route without it, from a session without a role or by a mistake anywhere along the way, went to every peer, from every router of ours, and nothing of ours stood in the way. export_limits are a second check, independent of the roles, the marks and the export policy. For peers above or beside us (PROVIDER, PEER, ROUTE_SERVER, and any in another AS without a role): - prefixes: only routes for these go out, learned or our own. With our and our customers' space listed, a leak of anyone else's routes goes nowhere above us. - max_prefixes: if more routes were to go out than this, none of them does. The session ends with a Cease / Administrative Shutdown whose Shutdown Communication says why (RFC 9003), and the peer is held down for its import.hold_down_seconds, so that it is told nothing rather than too much. The whole table is counted before any of it is sent. They are set at the top and hold for every such peer that has none of its own; unlike `export`, a peer's own export policy does not drop them. A peer's own export_limits take their place, and an empty one lifts them. Customers, route server clients and our own routers are not limited. A configuration in which learned routes are passed on and a peer in another AS has no role is now refused, as is accept_unconfigured_peers with learned routes: without a role, a peer's routes go to everyone and it is told of everything. This used to be a warning. At startup, a warning for each peer the limits apply to that has none, and for each originated route the limits leave out. A metric, bgp_export_limit_exceeded_total, counts the sessions ended for it. The interop lab has a phase in which a customer leaks: a route outside its space never reaches BIRD, and when more were to go than the limit, BIRD's session ends and its log has our reason. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ferrix BGP
An implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, which is used to exchange routing and control plane information between Autonomous Systems.
The aim of this project is to provide a modern, high performance, secure, programmatic and customizable software package that can be useful to network operators, researchers, and people interested in Internet.
Current status
The daemon establishes BGP sessions with configured neighbors, evaluates received routes against import policy, validates them with the RPKI (route origin validation and ASPA), selects the best path for each prefix, and, on Linux, installs it in the kernel. It advertises the routes that it originates and, to neighbors configured for it, the best paths learned from other neighbors, as BGP roles (RFC 9234) and communities permit.
Ferrix has not been deployed in a production network.
Unsupported Features
- Route reflection, per-client best path selection for route servers, and ADD-PATH for advertised routes
- TCP-AO, TCP MD5, and GTSM
- Graceful restart, BFD, and configuration changes without a restart
- Recursive resolution of next hops that are not directly connected
Layout
| Crate | What is in it |
|---|---|
crates/primitives |
Prefixes, address families, parsing helpers |
crates/packet |
The wire format: messages, attributes, capabilities |
crates/rib |
The routing table, best route selection, the journal of changes |
crates/rpki |
The RTR client; origin validation and ASPA path verification |
crates/fib |
The best routes in the Linux kernel, over netlink |
crates/server |
Sessions, the state machine, policy, configuration |
crates/web |
The status page, HTTP API and metrics |
bin/bgp |
The daemon |
Documentation
The documentation is a website built from docs/ with
Zola:
zola --root docs serve # http://127.0.0.1:1111
- Overview and quick start
- User guide: BGP neighbors, import policy, BGP roles, RPKI, kernel route installation, route advertisement, configuration examples
- Deployment and monitoring
- Reference: configuration, HTTP API, metrics, supported standards
- Architecture and testing
Development
CI runs these on every push, and fails on any warning:
cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test --workspace
RUSTDOCFLAGS="-D warnings" cargo doc --workspace --no-deps --document-private-items
zola --root docs build
It also runs the tests that need a real Linux kernel
(scripts/kernel-tests.sh) and the lab with FRR, BIRD and Routinator
(scripts/interop/lab.sh); scripts/linux-vm.sh runs either from macOS.
Lints are configured once, under [workspace.lints] in the root Cargo.toml.
unsafe code is forbidden throughout.
cargo test includes property tests: generated messages must survive being
written and read back, and no input, however damaged, may make a parser
panic. They take about a second; for a longer hunt:
PROPTEST_CASES=1000000 cargo test --release -p bgp-packet --test properties
Coverage-guided fuzz targets for the same parsers are in fuzz/; see
fuzz/README.md. CI runs each of them for a minute.
License
Apache License 2.0; see LICENSE.