[6bone] [NOTIFY] XS26 service/peering outage

[Jan Oravec]

On Mon, Dec 16, 2002 at 09:26:00PM +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> On Monday 16 December 2002, at 18 h 3, 
> Petr Baudis <pasky@xs26.net> wrote:
> 
> > and bgpd. Apart random crashes in various time periods (from few minutes to
> > weeks) 
> 
> A funny things about distributed systems is the difference in testimonies :-) 
> We never had a Zebra crash.

You were probably never running zebra on router with 2048 interfaces, having
2k static routes redistributed into BGP, 10k internal BGP routes, about 200
prefixes in IGP and about 300 external BGP routes.

The result: CPU time of ospf6d reached sometimes ~100%, zebra was unable to
save config files, zebra sometimes freezed for 5 minutes or so making ospf6d
and bgpd also freeze, sometimes something crashed and so on.

Zebra is not ready for production networks.

> > problems, especially on FreeBSD we had visibly more problems than on ie. Linux.
> 
> I do not have personal experience with Zebra on FreeBSD but, on the Zebra 
> mailing list, you can clearly see there are far more FreeBSD users than Linux 
> ones so I doubt that Zebra is much worse on FreeBSD.

e.g. this one FreeBSD-only bug: you create interface in the system and in
order to zebra know about it, you have to restart zebra completely...
imagine doing 100 such changes a day... your BGP peers won't like you :)...
fortunatelly we have found an ugly way how to solve this...


> > Basically, zebra looks not to be prepared for the networks which change very
> > dynamically (our iBGP table changes very frequently as user prefixes appear and
> > disappear; it's also relatively big (in the 6bone world, at least ;) 
> 
> We use Zebra for default-free routers on the IPv4 Internet. The 6 bone is a 
> very small experiment when you compare it to the always-changing 100k routes 
> of the IPv4 Internet.

We have 10k always-changing routes in the IPv6. BGP implementation is
relatively good if you don't dynamically add/remove interfaces.

We are not saying zebra is bad, we just say it is not usable in our
environment.


Best Regards,

-- 
Jan Oravec                           XS26 coordinator
6COM s.r.o.                          'Access to IPv6'
http://www.6com.sk                   http://www.xs26.net
+421-903-316905