Birdwatcher 3.0.0

This is a lightweight clone of the birdwatcher.

It is written in rust and focusses on a small memory footprint and a minimal feature set in order to work with Alice.

NOTICE: This software is work in progress and should be considered a 'preview' release.

Configuration

Lightwatcher is configured entirely using environment variables:

Server Settings

LIGHTWATCHER_LISTEN (default: 127.0.0.1:8181)

• Address and port where the HTTP server listens.

LIGHTWATCHER_BIRD_CTL (default: /var/run/bird/bird.ctl)

• Path to BIRD control socket.

LIGHTWATCHER_BIRD_CONNECTION_POOL_SIZE (default: 10)

• Number of concurrent BIRD connections.

Cache Settings

LIGHTWATCHER_ROUTES_CACHE_MAX_ENTRIES (default: 25)

• Maximum number of cached route queries.

LIGHTWATCHER_ROUTES_CACHE_TTL (default: 300)

• Route cache lifetime in seconds.

LIGHTWATCHER_NEIGHBORS_CACHE_MAX_ENTRIES (default: 1)

• Maximum number of cached neighbor queries.

LIGHTWATCHER_NEIGHBORS_CACHE_TTL (default: 300)

• Neighbor cache lifetime in seconds.

Performance Settings

LIGHTWATCHER_ROUTES_WORKER_POOL_SIZE (default: <cpu cores>)

• Number of worker threads for route parsing.

Rate Limiting

LIGHTWATCHER_RATE_LIMIT_REQUESTS (default: 512)

• Maximum requests allowed per window.

LIGHTWATCHER_RATE_LIMIT_WINDOW (default: 60)

• Rate limit window duration in seconds.

BIRD Configuration

Ensure BIRD uses ISO long time format:

timeformat base         iso long;
timeformat log          iso long;
timeformat protocol     iso long;
timeformat route        iso long;

Tagging filtered routes

If you want to make use of the filtered route reasons in Alice-LG, you need to make sure that you are using BIRD 1.6.3 or up (2.x, 3.x) as you will need Large BGP Communities (http://largebgpcommunities.net/) support.

Also please note that BIRD 1.x is end of life!

You need to add a Large BGP Community just before you filter a route, for example:

define yourASN = 12345
define yourFilteredNumber = 65666
define prefixTooLong = 1
define pathTooLong = 2

function importScrub() {
    ...
    if (net.len > 24) then {
        print "REJECTING: ",net.ip,"/",net.len," received from ",from,": Prefix is longer than 24: ",net.len,"!";
        bgp_large_community.add((YourASN,yourFilteredNumber,prefixTooLong));
        return false;
    }
    if (bgp_path.len > 64) then {
        print "REJECTING: ",net.ip,"/",net.len," received from ",from,": AS path length is ridiculously long: ",bgp_path.len,"!";
        bgp_large_community.add((yourASN,yourFilteredNumber,pathTooLong));
        return false;
    }
    ...
    return true;
}

function importFilter() {
    ...
    if !(importScrub()) then reject;
    ...
    accept;
}

Monitoring

An enpoint for monitoring the service available under /health and contains information about the current version and the connection to the BIRD daemon.

Troubleshooting

Cannot connect to BIRD socket Check that BIRD is running and the socket path is correct. Verify permissions:

ls -l /var/run/bird/bird.ctl

Contributing

Please feel free to test this software and create issues. An issue should contain the request and idealy a dump of the birdc result.