[ixpmanager] BFD on Route Servers

[André Grüneberg]

Hi Richard,

In case you feel lucky to enable unauthenticated BFD (I wouldn't), I see no
harm in enabling passive BFD everywhere.
During Euro-IX in May 2022 we recommended to use an interval of 1s and a
multiplier of 5. Part of the rationale are platform convergence time and
recommendations from RFC7419 <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc7419/>.

If you were adding support for (self service) parameter customisation, I'd
find a knob to enable/disable BFD for a session sensible.
I'd also add an option to define the authentication key.
In case you are exposing interval or multiplier, they should be
configurable as range verified against globally defined bounds.

Besides that, BFD support has been proposed earlier in
https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/issues/351.

BR,
André

On Thu, 8 Jun 2023 at 03:36, Richard Laager via ixpmanager <
ixpmanager at inex.ie> wrote:

> MICE has long enabled passive BFD (Bidirectional Forwarding Detection,
> RFC 5880) on our route servers. Here, "passive" means the route servers
> will speak BFD to a customer, but only if the customer initiates it.
> Accordingly, it is NOT necessary to track a per-customer setting about
> whether they want BFD.
>
> We converted our route servers to use the configuration generated by IXP
> Manager. IXP Manager does not support BFD, so we added it using a skin.
> My question here is whether there is desire to see that upstreamed.
>
> I've started a draft PR:
> https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/pull/854
>
> The first commit in there has been submitted as a separate PR and can be
> ignored for this discussion. The relevant changes are in the second
> commit, currently:
>
> https://github.com/inex/IXP-Manager/pull/854/commits/1c684aa7a662480af2930c2e525a09a95c717e1c
>
> As you can see, the changes themselves are trivial. However, if this is
> going to be merged into IXP Manager, there are some important design
> questions:
>
> Is BFD going to be enabled everywhere? If not, it needs an option. Is
> that option on or off by default? If on, should it be set to off for
> existing Routers on migration?
>
> Should the interval be customizable? Should the multiplier?
>
> --
> Richard
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-- 
André Grüneberg, Managing Director
andre.grueneberg at bcix.de
+49 30 2332195 42

BCIX Management GmbH
Albrechtstr. 110
12103 Berlin
Germany

Geschäftsführer/Managing Directors: Jens Lietzmann, André Grüneberg
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