Router configuration conventions

This package uses what I call logical port names to identify the ports in a PoP. The main advantage to using logical names is that you can track the statistics for a given circuit or connection even though you move it to another physical port in the same PoP, possibly on a different router.

This package has been written with cisco routers in mind, and with a tool to collect the logical port names from the routers, in particular from the "description" field for each interface. For this to work, certain conventions need to be adhered to when setting up the description field:

The information about the mapping between "logging file name" used by the traffic poller and the logical port names is collected and updated once per day by the script bin/update-dbs. This information is recorded in a DBM database (on-disk hash from Perl).

For other routers than cisco routers, these mappings need to be maintained manually, and the update-dbs script needs to be prevented from trying to collect this information. You do the latter by listing the router names in db/manual-rtrs. To update the mapping information, use the bin/dbm-edit or the bin/dbm-dump and the bin/dbm-load scripts.

It is also important to adhere to a couple of other conventions when configuring routers for this package to work well:


he@nordu.net
Last modified: Thu Jun 26 12:34:57 MET DST 1997