[ixpmanager] Route Server Installation

[Barry O'Donovan]

Hi Sam,

Sam Malyon wrote on 29/03/2020 15:34:
> I’m having issues installing the route server as I have never actually 
> used Bird before.
> 
> So I have completed the router config on IXP Manager (Excluding the API 
> details). And installed bird using “apt-get install bird” but after that 
> I have no idea how to connect it to IXP Manager. I haven’t yet installed 
> Birdseye.
> 
> Any Suggestions on what I should do here as I’m lost?

Bird as a route server and Birdseye are separate components and you do 
not /need/ to install Birdseye but we would strongly recommend it. You 
should have a look at some of out talks from 2019 on this stuff at:

https://www.ixpmanager.org/presentations

The one from UKNOF is probably the most recent and best (although the 
slides didn't work at the beginning which is why it's a bit rough there 😉).

IXP Manager will configure Bird for three purposes: route servers, route 
collectors and an AS112 service. As such, the documentation is split a 
little. The most important one is:

https://docs.ixpmanager.org/features/routers/

and particularly the section 'Configuration Generation Overview'.

Then you should look at the route server specific stuff on:

https://docs.ixpmanager.org/features/route-servers/

I take it from your offlist email that you have Bird installed and 
you're trying to figure out out it connects to IXP Manager. That is 
covered in the specific section I mentioned above. We have sample 
scripts for this which you can find here:

https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/tree/master/tools/runtime/route-servers

and specifically:

https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/blob/master/tools/runtime/route-servers/api-reconfigure-example-birdv2.sh


You will need to download that to your route server and then edit the 
settings at the top:

KEY="your-api-key"
URL="https://ixp.example.com/ixp/api/v4/router/gen-config"
URL_DONE="https://ixp.example.com/ixp/api/v4/router/updated"
ETCPATH="/usr/local/etc/bird"
RUNPATH="/var/run/bird"
LOGPATH="/var/log/bird"
BIN="/usr/sbin/bird"

You can create an API key per:

https://docs.ixpmanager.org/features/api/

The URLs reflect wherever the script can access IXP Manager via http(s).

Once that's all set, you can run it in debugging mode via:

bash ./api-reconfigure-example-birdv2.sh -d <handle>

where '<handle>' is the handle you gave the route server when adding it 
via the form in IXP Manager. E.g.

bash ./api-reconfigure-example-birdv2.sh -d rs1-ipv4


Once you have the route server running, you can then turn to Birdseye 
which integrates into IXP Manager for monitoring and looking glass 
features. That's documented at:

https://docs.ixpmanager.org/features/looking-glass/

https://github.com/inex/birdseye/blob/master/README.md


  - Barry