[ixpmanager] Sysctl tweaks?

[Nick Hilliard]

On 15/04/2013 10:53, Joe Wooller wrote:
> I was curious as to what flavour you run BIRD on (assuming linux here)
> and what sysctl tweaks do you use?
> I am about to jump in to playing with BIRD as a replacement for our
> Route Servers down under, we currently use a vendor..
> 
> If there is anyone else on list using BIRD I would love to know your
> thoughts/experiences/etc too.

At the moment, we're running bird 1.3.1 on freebsd 8.2/amd64 with nothing
special except for a kernel which supports tcp MD5 checksums.  I.e. no
sysctl tweaks.  The configuration sizes are:

> ferris# wc bird-rs2-*.conf
>     2716   78577 1190603 bird-rs2-vlan10-ipv4.conf
>     1780   13030  122797 bird-rs2-vlan10-ipv6.conf
>     1345   15133  217224 bird-rs2-vlan12-ipv4.conf
>     1031    3227   24602 bird-rs2-vlan12-ipv6.conf

BIRD will also work fine on any recent version of linux.

This has turned out to be a very stable configuration for us.  Our BIRD
daemons were last restarted in August 2011 and we haven't had any problems
with them since then.  We'll probably do some maintenance later this year,
but this is just for operating system upgrades.

It shouldn't be necessary to do any particular tweaking because bird isn't
exporting any prefixes to the kernel forwarding table.  It's running as a
plain old daemon with a certain memory footprint and a bunch of open tcp
sockets.  I.e. its requirements are very modest.

Nick