success with tools

Dale suggested this list would be interested in a progress report on
CA*net's use of the RA code. We have been successful in doing a
complete configuration run for CA*net using peval, the radbserver and
a ripe-181 database. This has permitted us to decommission the old
build system we had in place that dated back to when CA*net used gated
(it has ciscos now).

We had some surgery to perform on the code in question, because of the
gated specific nature of it. As a general, possibly quite obvious
comment, I would like to suggest that peval and friends produce a
attributed list instead of a list of values and attributes. gated uses
the latter, but cisco uses the former. Its trivial to distribute, less
easy to invert, especially if you cannot assume that things are all
grouped. I would also like to suggest that the tools be a bit more
oriented around a policy stage with a router-independent notation and
a configuration build stage.

We mostly just focused on getting what was available up right now. But
I have alot I want to automate with cisco generation, and I have an
interest in looking at this package for other types of routers that
look nothing like gated at all, and would need to drive, say, expect
scripts.  Anyone remember Proteons? :-)

Our next efforts will be to introduce real localpref configuration by
AS or route into our process. Also, we are looking into what it will
take to validate BGP path components with this package.

Eric Carroll	University of Toronto Network & Operations Services
		Supervisor, External Networking Facilities Management
		CA*net Network Engineering



-------- Logged at  Mon Jan 23 20:11:14 MET 1995  ---------