Wireless Service Providers → MT Router not sending/receiving routes

I got my BGP setup today with ISP #1 and I currently have a session established. For some reason I'm not receiving any of their routes and they aren't receiving mine. When I look in the routeros BGP log I can see the routes coming from them but they aren't being added to my route table.

What could be going wrong here?

Keefe

Im not sure what your problem is, but I was curious what the advantage would be to having your own bgp routes with your ISP, as my ISP offers it as well.

The most basic explanation is that BGP allows one to route the same IP block over multiple ISPs for load balancing and redundancy.

Post a /rout bgp export.

I got it working now.

Here's what the problem was: Under BGP -> Peers -> peer1 -> advanced there's something called "address families" and there's three options: ip, ipv6, l2vpn. The default is to have none checked. As soon as I checked "ip" I had 200,000 routes come crashing into my route table and everything is working now. I have no idea why this isn't mentioned in the documentation.

That little option was added in V3. It was a pain for us to find as well.

Interesting on the BGP

But this is effectively useless if you use the same ISP for your bandwidth with no other ISP's in the mix?

Right, BGP isn't of much use if you only have one ISP.

Are you receiving full routes? If so, is it now impossible to open up the routes window in winbox?

In general if you are receiving full routes the routes window will take a while to pop up but it should still come up. As you add more connections (I have 4 BGP peers currently, 2 receiving full routes (245000 on one, 255000 on the other, roughly estimated) and 2 BGP peers (bogons) for null routing traffic that doesn't need to go out to the Internet.

I am not on V3 yet, but on 2.9 it is sluggish.

I'm using v3 and winbox shows the CPU at 100% when I hit the routes button, although I'm not sure if that's accurate. After several seconds of that it pops up an error that says I should filter because there are too many results.

For those who are interested, the full routes used around 175 MB of memory on the router. CPU usage did not seem to increase at all after turning up BGP. This is an x86-based 'powerrouter' clone with 1 gb of ram.

I also get the 100% cpu usage for about a minute after hitting the routes button on 2.9, but it does still load the list with no errors. The filter option sounds interesting -- I guess I can see an application for that.

Those of you using BGP on Mikrotik for a significant period of time, how is it running? Does it ever crash/have problems?
Would you recommend it, I am running default routes on a cisco currently simply because I don't want to have to buy a router with >256mb of ram.

I have been running BGP on Mikrotik now for about 2 years. There were issues in the transition from the routing package to the routing-test package, and then at roughly 2.9.23 they really got their heads together and got routing-test to the point that it was working well. Throughout 2.9.30 and 2.9.40 they had a few more kinks that could cause BGP to crash (I ran into this once on 2.9.43), but since I switched to 2.9.50 the same problems that caused 2.9.43 to crash aren't problems at all.

I was heavily thinking Cisco and talking about getting a better router with more memory, but the honest fact is that if you are trying to do BGP at a low cost, Mikrotik is not only a good, workable solution, it is also FAR easier to set up than Cisco (in my opinion). As with anything not Cisco, I will also say your mileage may vary. Some carriers, since they aren't familiar with Mikrotik won't even help with it. That's where a community like this really comes in.

Imagestream is a better alternative to Cisco. We have 2 Imagestream routers running vrrp and BGP. Cost about $4500 for both, ram, and initial configuration service.

Justin