FastNetMon and ExaBGP integration

This guide covers FastNetMon Community only. FastNetMon Advanced has bundled BGP support which can be configured directly from our command line interface.

For all new deployments we advice using GoBGP integration as it offers way better capabilities then ExaBGP.

FastNetMon could enable/disable announce of blackholed IPs (/32) to BGP core router (Cisco, Juniper, Quagga, Bird, Extreme, Brocade). This feature implemented with ExaBGP toolkit.

If you want to use this capability, please set following params in /etc/fastnetmon.conf and tune they to values suitable in your network:

exabgp = on
exabgp_command_pipe = /var/run/exabgp.cmd
exabgp_community = 65001:666
exabgp_next_hop = 10.0.3.114
exabgp_announce_host = on

Secondly, you should install, configure and run ExaBGP toolkit.

Install ExaBGP 3:

pip install exabgp==3.4.20

All our instructions suitable only for ExaBGP 3.

Install socat (if you do not have socat for your platform, please check this manual):

apt-get install -y socat
yum install -y socat

Create example configuration:

vim /etc/exabgp_blackhole.conf

Example here (please fix this configuration to your network):

group Core_v4 {
    hold-time 180;
    # local AS number
    local-as 65001;
    # Remote AS number
    peer-as 1234;
    # ID for this ExaBGP router
    router-id 10.0.3.114;
    graceful-restart 1200;

    # Remote peer
    neighbor 10.0.3.115 {
        # Local IP addess which used for connections to this peer
        local-address 10.0.3.114;
        description "Quagga";
    }   

    # Add this line for process management
    process service-dynamic {
        run /usr/bin/socat stdout pipe:/var/run/exabgp.cmd;
    }   
}

Run ExaBGP:

env exabgp.daemon.user=root exabgp.daemon.daemonize=true exabgp.daemon.pid=/var/run/exabgp.pid exabgp.log.destination=/var/log/exabgp.log exabgp /etc/exabgp_blackhole.conf

Don’t be puzzled by ExaBGP’s output like this one:

exabgp: 1363   configuration environment file missing
exabgp: 1363   configuration generate it using "exabgp --fi > /usr/local/etc/exabgp/exabgp.env"

It just warning, not an error message. ExaBGP will start in background.

You can get more details about it from log file:

cat /var/log/exabgp.log

You could read my articles about ExaBGP configuration too: first and second