Setting Up a Looking Glass

[theodore at ciscodude.net (Theodore Baschak)]

> On Jun 13, 2015, at 11:29 AM, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
> 
> What's out there for setting up your own looking glass? I saw lots of lists of dead projects or projects that hadn't received any love in years. Being as most the people I work with don't run Cisco, Juniper, etc. for routers, likely having those capabilities with the LG would be nice. 
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> Mike Hammett 
> Intelligent Computing Solutions 
> http://www.ics-il.com 
> 

If you want/need BGP, OpenBSD + OpenBGPD (with their bgplg cgi/restricted shell) is fairly easy to set up. You mesh the looking glass in like any other router in your system, and it gives you full visibility. I wrote a how-to that you can basically copy and paste into a new 1vCPU/1GB vRAM OpenBSD VM which a lot of people have found helpful in setting this type of thing up:
https://ciscodude.net/2014/05/14/openbsd-5-dot-5-bgplg/ <https://ciscodude.net/2014/05/14/openbsd-5-dot-5-bgplg/>
This was written for 5.5 but also works on 5.6. I will be checking what changes with 5.7 in the coming weeks as time permits, and will write a followup article if need be.

bgplg also is brandable, there is a template file you can edit to change the logos, and add additional information about your network if desired.

Similar to what I?ve written about with OpenBSD, you could also peer a system running BIRD (not announcing anything) into your network, and run ulg.py (https://github.com/tmshlvck/ulg <https://github.com/tmshlvck/ulg>). 

Theo Baschak