XORP pronounced as "Zorp" is eXtensible Open Router Platform.

XORP is an extensible open source routing platform released under a BSD style License. While designed for extensibility, XORP provides a fully featured platform that implements IPv4 and IPv6 routing protocols and a unified platform to configure them. Vyatta Opensource router implements XORP routing platform. XORP is the only open source platform to offer integrated multicast capability. XORP's modular architecture allows rapid introduction of new protocols, features and functionality, including support for custom hardware and software forwarding.

The latest stable version of XORP is 1.4 and there is a XORP Live CD that can boot a PC with it and run without having to do any installations. When running the Live CD any config changes can be saved to a Floppy disk (if a Floppy disk exist on the PC). XORP can run on all BSD distributions and most of the LINUX distributions, MacOSX and on Windows.

XORP has a JunOS style CLI to configure and manage the router  as against the Cisco style and maintains a single config file.

The following are the protocols are supported on XORP:

UNICAST

BGP4+ (IPv4 and IPv6 versions)

OSPFv2 and OSPFv3

RIP for IPv4 and RIPng for IPv6

MULTICAST

PIM-SM

IGMP/MLD

The performance of PC-based XORP implementations depends on the forwarding capability of the underlying hardware. For higher bandwidth requirement or greater speed, XORP can be used as a software stack for controlling advanced hardware forwarding planes. Its Forwarding Engine Abstraction (FEA) process provides a key abstraction layer that isolates higher level routing functionality from the underlying operating system and forwarding engines. This makes it straightforward to port XORP to new hardware platforms using software shims.

XORP also supports third party integrations using its API's making it completely transparent from the outside.

While XORP is a great open platform for research, it is stable and is of production quality to run live routing systems. For more information, FAQs and installation procedures please visit the XORP homepage here.

On October 29 2007, Vyatta announced the latest release of its open-source networking software. The Vyatta Community Edition (VC3) software combines router, firewall, and VPN capabilities into an integrated solution that delivers twice the performance of proprietary network solutions at half the price.

The latest release, Vyatta Community Edition 3 (VC3) provides substantial enhancements and feature additions from the previous VC2 release, including IPSec VPN, multi-link PPP, and BGP scaling and security.

IPSec VPN
Vyatta now supports dedicated site-to-site (branch-to-branch or branch-to-HQ) virtual private networking and supports the most widely used cryptographic algorithms, including 3DES, AES (128 and 256-bit), MD5, and SHA1. In addition, IPsec VPN can now be configured in a cluster of multiple Vyatta units with failover mechanisms providing high availability for mission-critical services.

Multi-link PPP (MLPPP)
MLPPP allows customers to increase WAN bandwidth by using multiple low-speed circuits, in parallel, enabling a Bandwidth optimization by using multiple connections to increase bandwidth.
 
BGP scaling and security enhancements
Improved BGP scaling provides faster routing convergence with many peers. MD5-based neighbor authentication delivers improved routing security. Per-BGP peer policy support makes it easier than ever to control route propagation. New monitoring and troubleshooting commands make Vyatta easier to use.

Vyatta Community Edition (VC3) is now available for download from here. Vyatta is planning to release a new version of its software every 6 months.

This project is to build an enhanced firmware for Linksys WRT54GS (versions 1.0 to 3.0 with 32MB RAM/8MB Flash) and similar routers, offering multiple Internet service providers Load Balance and Server Load Balancing capabilities (Layer 2). The Server Load Balancer technology is from by http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/.

There are a number of routers supported by EzPlanet running Linux that have a base WAN (Ethernet) port and one or more LAN Ethernet ports. These routers could also be configured to load balance two (or more) WAN (ADSL) Internet links.

The latest version Ezplanet V24.1 has suport for web based IPVS status.

More information can be found here

Information on Multihome Load Balance can be found here

Quagga is a routing software suite, providing implementations of OSPFv2, OSPFv3, RIP v1 and v2, RIPng and BGP-4 and supports IPv4 and IPv6 on Unix platforms, particularly FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and NetBSD. Quagga also supports special BGP Route Reflector and Route Server behavior.

Quagga is a fork of GNU Zebra which was developed by Kunihiro Ishiguro. The Quagga tree aims to build a more involved community around Quagga than the current centralised model of GNU Zebra.

A system with Quagga installed acts as a dedicated router. With Quagga, your machine exchanges routing information with other routers using routing protocols. Quagga uses this information to update the kernel routing table. You can dynamically change the configuration and you may view routing table information from the Quagga terminal interface.

Adding to routing protocol support, Quagga can setup interface's flags, interface's address, static routes and so on. If you have a small network, or a stub network, or xDSL connection, configuring the Quagga routing software is very easy. The only thing you have to do is to set up the interfaces and put a few commands about static routes and/or default routes. If the network is rather large, or if the network structure changes frequently, you will want to take advantage of Quagga's dynamic routing protocol support for protocols such as RIP, OSPF or BGP.

Currently, Quagga supports common unicast routing protocols. Multicast routing protocols such as BGMP, PIM-SM, PIM-DM may be supported in Quagga 2.0. MPLS support is going on. In the future, TCP/IP filtering control, QoS control, diffserv configuration will be added to Quagga. Quagga project's final goal is making a productive, quality, free TCP/IP routing software.

Quagga daemons are each configurable via a network accessible CLI (called a 'vty'). There is an additional tool included with Quagga called 'vtysh', which acts as a single cohesive front-end to all the daemons, allowing one to administer nearly all aspects of the various Quagga daemons in one place. Similar to commercial systems, there are two user modes in Quagga. One is normal mode, the other is enable mode. Normal mode user can only view system status, enable mode user can change system configuration.

The Quagga architecture consists of a core daemon:

zebra – acts as an abstraction layer to the underlying Unix kernel and presents the Zserv API over a Unix or TCP stream to Quagga clients. It is these Zserv clients which typically implement a routing protocol and communicate routing updates to the zebra daemon. Existing Zserv clients are:

ospfd – implementing OSPFv2

ripd  – implementing RIP v1 and V2

ospf6d – implementing OSPFv3 (IPv6)

ripngd  – implementing RIPng (IPv6)

bgpd  – implementing BGPv4+ (including address family support for multicast and IPv6)

Additionally, the Quagga architecture has a rich development library to facilitate the implementation of protocol/client daemons, coherent in configuration and administrative behaviour.

For more information and download, please click here

Quagga run a test route-server which can be accessed via telnet. More information here.