[Xorp-hackers] Want to contribute !!!!!

[Pavlin Radoslavov]

Kristian Larsson <kristian at spritelink.se> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 01:40:55AM +0530, Ashish Karpe wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >        we are team of 4 members doing our Engineering project
> > (Academic Project). So we want  to contribute to this project !!!
> >             Is PIM-BIDIR & Anycast-RP been implemented in XORP ? If
> > not can it be done ? If we give this support to Xorp how much will it
> > be benificial for Xorp project ?
> No, neither BIDIR-PIM or Anycasted RPs are
> implemented in XORP today but it certainly can be
> done.
> If you look at http://www.xorp.org/roadmap.html
> you may see that BIDIR-PIM is on the roadmap for
> early 2007. I don't think that's a realistic goal
> as the work on OSPFv3 hasn't started yet (please
> correct me if I'm wrong) with about a month to go.
> Anyway, the project sure needs a few extra hands
> so if you're willing, go right ahead. It's hard to
> approximate just how much XORP may benefit from
> this, it's kinda up to you :)
> 
> A step on the way towards Anycasted RPs would be
> adding MSDP support, for which I just added a bug
> yesterday to the BugZilla.
> I recommend reading the papers at
> http://www.xorp.org/design_docs.html before
> getting to work :)

Indeed, currently XORP doesn't have Bidir PIM-SM and Anycast-RP
support, but as Kristian mentions above we are planning to implement
them anyway.

However, I would advice against taking on the task of implementing
Bidir-PIM or Anycast-RP. Both mechanisms require detailed
understanding of the PIM-SM internals (as implemented in XORP), and
lots of your effort might be spent reading the source code or doing
things are not very productive from the perspective of your project
(e.g., making sure that your implementation logic is consistent with
the PIM-SM internals, coding style, etc).

Instead, I'd recommend that you consider implementing MSDP, because
it is not on our TODO list. By doing so, you will have much more
freedom (and fun :) designing the implementatation on your own,
and at the end you will learn much more about protocol
implementation.

Pavlin