OpenBGP really rocks - shall send a few six packs to Sechelt rapids for your next Hackaton there - thanks guys! My upstream IP transit provider was a bit surprised when he learned that his shining Cisco 7xxx is eBGP peering - incl. MD5 sums! - since about one month to a mighty old Compaq desktop with a Pentium-III 450 MHz and 256 MByte RAM...
Today, I tried to setup a iBGP peering session to that PC running OpenBSD 3.8. I started with a virtual machine also using OpenBSD 3.8 as guest OS in VMware 5.5.1 on a SuSE 10.0 host. The iBGP peering sessions come up nicely, but always die after the Holdtime expires. tcpdump shows that from the VMware machine no BGP Keepalives are originated nor answered. Which causes the BGP peering sessions to go down while, or shortly after (depending on the Holdtime setting), receiving the full feed updates. However, it looks like this problem is not specific to OpenBGP. Because I observe that 'top' does not update the display at all, even though it accepts keyboard commands. So far I was unable to determine the cause for this behaviour, nor find any other problem reports about such problems running OpenBSD in VMware. So I moved my /etc/bgp.conf over to a WRAP1E (Geode 266 MHz, 128 MByte RAM) which runs OpenBSD 3.8 too. Amazing, bgpd runs now since a few hours on this plattform. Like you documented before for Soekris boards, a full feed with about 172k prefixes uses not more than 7 MByte RAM, and the CPU load is close to 0% once the initial updates were received after startup. Is there anyone out there who is willing to provide me with a second BGP4 full feed for a few weeks? I'd love to see the RIB selection in action and document some measurements! In exchange, I can offer a full feed from AS8220 out of Switzerland (filtered to provde "read-only" updates, of course, with or without MD4 sum). Thanks, Rolf
