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.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!