2

We bought one Amazon Direct Connect leased line to connect our datacenter to Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon has configurations for Cisco or Juniper Hardware (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/directconnect/latest/UserGuide/getstarted.html).

However, is it also possible to use Linux as a router (for example by using Quagga, http://www.nongnu.org/quagga/)?

olliiiver
  • 256

2 Answers2

2

It turns out that it's pretty easy to connect to EC2 by using Quagga with Debian Linux.

/etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
    address 10.x.x.x
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 10.x.x.x
    broadcast 10.x.x.x
    gateway 10.x.x.x


allow-hotplug eth1
iface eth1 inet static
    address 169.254.237.18
    netmask 255.255.255.252
    network 169.254.237.16
    broadcast 169.254.237.19

/etc/quagga/bgpd.conf

!
! Zebra configuration saved from vty
!   2006/06/09 16:13:05
!
hostname rr1-bgp
password zebra
enable password zebra
log file /var/log/quagga/bgpd.log
!
router bgp 65000
  neighbor 169.254.237.17 remote-as 7224
  neighbor 169.254.237.17 password PASSWORD_FROM_AWS_CONSOLE
  network 10.10.21.0/24
!
line vty

However, as Quagga does not really support BFD we also gave BIRD (http://bird.network.cz) a try. A connection can be established with both, but I think it's better to support BFD on our side, too.

/etc/bird.conf

router id 169.254.237.18;

#debug protocols all;


protocol direct {
    interface "eth0";
}


protocol kernel {
    persist;

    scan time 20;

    export all;

}


protocol device {
    scan time 100;
}


protocol bgp {
    description "My BGP link";
    local as 65000;
    neighbor 169.254.237.17 as 7224;
    password "PASSWORD_FROM_AWS_CONSOLE";
    export all;
    bfd on;
}


protocol bfd {
        interface "eth*" {
                min rx interval 5000 ms;
                min tx interval 5000 ms;
                idle tx interval 5000 ms;
        };
        multihop {
                interval 200 ms;
                multiplier 10;
        };
        neighbor 169.254.237.17;
}
Community
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olliiiver
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0

Take a look at the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR1000V). It is available to run both in the Amazon Cloud (1) and as a VM on your premises as well. (2)

Its essentially a fully featured ASR router running in software, so you can do virtually everything you'd need to do to interconnect your sites (routing protocols, encryption, inter-VLAN routing, QoS, NAT, etc etc etc)

Jason Seemann
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