[c-nsp] Dump full route table to a file

[Bill Wichers]

> We've got a guy who has sent us a request for our "routing table".
>
> After talking to him a few times, it turns out he really does want a
full dump of all forwarding routes currently active in our 7200 edge
router (which has 3 BGP peers and around 155,000 routes).  He wants this
information dumped to a text file, and he'd like it done about 10
different times throughout the day.
>
> Just saying "No" isn't really an option due to various things...

After reading through this thread, looks like no one's actually done this
so I'll add a bit. I *have* done this before, to populate a file needed by
flowscan (a netflow processor) to generate AS path info. I did it with
rlogin/rsh and ran the 'show ip bgp' command from a UNIX box that put the
results in a text file. It's not fun (takes a while, and puts a *lot* of
load on the router while it's going).

I would STRONGLY recommend finding a reason to tell your customer "no" on
this. It's going to be hard on your router. Much better would be to follow
the suggestion of giving the customer a BGP feed to quagga/zebra, and
letting the customer pull the info from that. This puts much less load on
your router, accomplishes pretty much the same thing, and will give you
the ability to filted the prefixes you send to your customer should you
need to do that.

I suppose if your customer *really* wants to do it this way (get the text
file direct from the router), you could run some old junker router to take
a BGP feed for the sole purpose of giving the customer somewhere to pull
the info from. Probably not a really great solution though unless you get
forced into doing it.

     -Bill

*****************************
Waveform Technology
UNIX Systems Administrator




*****************************
Waveform Technology
UNIX Systems Administrator