Bird – Internet Routing Daemon

Context: cz.nic are the producers of the Turris Omnia WiFi router, an OpenWRT-based SOHO router. ~US$300 buys you 2.4 &amp; 5 Ghz wifi, 5x 10&#x2F;100&#x2F;1000 ethernet, 2 GB RAM, 8 GB flash, 2x USB, 500 MHz ARM CPU, lots of blinkenlights, automatic updates (not otherwise included with OpenWRT), and numerous hardware modular expansions including internal mSata disk, SIM card capacity, and a NAS enclosure. That&#x27;s pricier than a proprietary router but considerably more powerful, versatile, and performant. I&#x27;m a happy owner.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.turris.cz&#x2F;omnia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.turris.cz&#x2F;omnia&#x2F;</a><p>The recently announced Mozilla WebThings gateway also runs on the Turris:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20532763" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20532763</a><p>The BIRD Internet Routing Daemon, a BGP routing service you can run yourself, is included in the available OpenWRT packages:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openwrt.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;pkgdata&#x2F;bird4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openwrt.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;pkgdata&#x2F;bird4</a><p>No, I don&#x27;t run BIRD myself, though it could be fun to play with.

Bird is pretty popular with CDN’s and IXP’s - a de facto standard [1].<p>For example it’s used by Netflix for “sharing network topology from ISP networks to Netflix control system in AWS” [2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinup.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;collection&#x2F;open-source-observatory-osor&#x2F;document&#x2F;bird-manages-routing-worlds-largest-internet-exchanges-bird" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;joinup.ec.europa.eu&#x2F;collection&#x2F;open-source-observato...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openconnect.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;appliances&#x2F;#software" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openconnect.netflix.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;appliances&#x2F;#software</a>

I really like BIRD. Having no prior experience with that sort of thing, we became a LIR at work and set up announcing our IP space to three different transit providers in three different sites. By using regular familiar looking config files it felt way more accessible than the standard stuff by&#x2F;for traditional network engineers most of which seem to lean on model of configuring by entering commands in a CLI and then persisting the current state.

I had a terrible experience with my Omnia and support willfully ignored me despite repeated requests for help.<p>It’s now sitting in my closet with a burnt out chip. Long story short, I put the same network cards in it all the enthusiasts were. Those slots were meant to be user upgradeable. It starts smoking, I open it up and send some pics to the company. They don’t get back to me. Two weeks later I do what anyone does in this position and post on their forums. That gets their attention, they write me back. Immediately they’re on the defensive and after another week of bartering agree to take a look at it only if I ship it to them at my expense and pay for the repairs. At this point I’ve already sunk 5 hundred dollars into it so I agree and ask for a shipping address. They never get back to me. Over the next month I send them follow up emails literally begging to pay them to fix my router. I never got a response.<p>Between CZ.nic and Purism, I’ve sworn off small hardware shops. It’s been my experience they often don’t stand behind their products when they fail or simply lack the customer service bigger firms can afford.<p>I ended up buying a few mesh routers from Synology which have been purring away ever since.

I used bird to build our companies network. At the time I couldn&#x27;t reason about how to manage Quagga with configuration management and I disliked how it tried to emulate a Cisco CLI. Bird solves my problems nicely for BGP and OSPF.

I would love to know if there is a stand-alone RIPng or Ospf daemon or better, kernel module which can be deployed to hosts with minimal effort<p>having to deploy whole zebra to just be able to announce local docker routes is a bit too much for my liking

Can someone please ELI5?<p>I don&#x27;t really get what dynamic IP routing is, or what this project means to solve at internet scale?