BGPHist

BGPHist is an open source, cross-platform and completely free command-line application that has been designed to get MP-BGP updates, decode them, and store them exclusively for monitoring and logging purposes. A simple web-based front-end is also provided when using the MySQL database.

Features at a glance

Besides the support for Internet routes, BGPHist also supports IPV6 VPN, IPv4 VPN, and L2VPN. Among the supported backend storages, we can mention Oracle and MySQL databases, as well as text output.

The project can be used to log and monitor ISP's customers activity for VPNs and Internet, as a passive BGP looking glass for all possible Internet and VPNs, as well as a backend for some external accounting and monitoring solution.

Command-line options

Only a few command-line options are available for the BGPHist program, such as -p for specifying a bgp peer IP, -a for specifying an ASN, -d for specifying a database type, including database connection parameters, -w for setting the async wait in milliseconds, as well as -f for playing a capture file instead of bgp router connect.

These command-line options can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘bgphist’ command in a terminal emulator, after the installation, which requires you to download, save and unpack the source tarball (TAR archive) on your computer, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/bgphist-0.0.4) from within a terminal emulator, run the ‘./configure && make’ command to compile the program, followed by the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it system wide.

Under the hood and supported operating systems

Taking a look under the hood of the BGPHist program, we can notice that it is written entirely in the C++ programming language, it’s web-based interface is written in the PHP server-side programming language, and it is compatible with the GNU/Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, supporting 64-bit and 32-bit CPU architectures.

What is new in this release:

• This version fixes lost updates after withdrawing the same route.

What is new in version 0.0.2:

• A MySQL signed tinyint dimension problem has been fixed.
• PHP MySQL frontend 32-bit compatibility issues have been fixed.
• Support has been added for playing BGP TCP streams previously saved into plain a binary file (use wireshark TCP stream extraction after follow TCP stream).
• An Oracle backend has been added.

Limitations:

• It's only a listener, it can't generate BGP update messages.
• In order to get all routing updates, the app should be connected to the BGP route reflector as a client.