Rayhaan JaufeerallyandClaude Opus 5.5
b16227c51f
A route learned from one router of our AS went to no other (RFC 4271 §9.2.1), so every router needed a session with every other. A router at the end of a single link, with one session to its neighbour inside the AS, heard only of what that neighbour learned itself, and nothing of what the neighbour had from the routers behind it. A peer in our own AS can now be made a route reflector client (`route_reflector_client`, RFC 4456). What a client sends goes to all our routers; what the others send goes to the clients. A reflected route gets ORIGINATOR_ID (where it started, if it does not say) and our cluster ID at the front of CLUSTER_LIST; it is not sent back to the router it started at, nor round to a cluster it has been through, and one that comes back anyway is refused as "route reflected back to us". The cluster ID is the router ID unless `cluster_id` says otherwise. The two attributes are now decoded as such rather than kept as bytes, and are never sent to other networks. Unlike a standard reflector, this one is the next hop of what it reflects, as it is of everything it announces: there is no resolving a next hop that is not a neighbour, so a client reaches what lies behind another router through the reflector. Only peers in our own AS can be clients; the configuration refuses the setting for any other. Nothing changes in what other networks are told: Only to Customer marks go along with reflected routes, and every receiving session keeps its own max_prefixes. 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.