[Xorp-users] Emulating multiple routers on the same host

[Mark Handley]

>The XORP Vision page mentions the ability to emulate multiple routers on 
>the same host, saying this can be done if you modify the FEA.  My 
>question is how do you modify the FEA to do this?  Do you have to hack 
>code, or can this be done by configuration?

Right now you'd have to hack code for it to be general.  You could run
multiple dummy FEA processes (each with its own finder and routing
protocols) but there would be no way to exchange routing packets
between the different virtual routers.  

As part of a project to implement IS-IS in XORP, I have a student who
is looking to test his implementation by emulating multiple routers,
so we've given some thought to how to make this work (but he was only
looking at IS-IS).  But right now, there's no code committed into CVS
to do this.

You can currently run multiple BGP instances on the same machine, as
BGP uses TCP, and you can configure the peer address and port on a
per-peer basis.  So if you want to experiment with BGP, this is
possible without code changes.  But the resulting virtual routers
won't actually forward packets to each other, so this is only useful
for routing experiments, not a general solution.

 - Mark