ircbgp 0.0.1

Proof of concept implementation for an IRC bot to simulate bgp with students.

ircbgp

Small script to simulate bgp with students using IRC.

What is needed

You need to design a topology and for each link between two ASes create an irc channel on a irc server. You can now assign AS numbers to students and let them either interact with this bot and/or each other.

Kudos to Tobias Fiebig, who used this concept in a lecture and gave the inspiration to write a bot for this.

Why?

Just a proof of concept, however, the bot could already be useful to replace participants leaving the lecture early.

Usage

Use screen to start multiple bots in parallel or use separate terminals:

   $ screen ircbgpbot Florian 1 '#as1-as2'
   $ screen ircbgpbot Claudia 2 '#as1-as2,#as2-as3'
   $ screen ircbgpbot Tobias  3 '#as2-as3'

This would start three bots connecting to a irc server running on localhost, names Florian, Claudia and Tobias. All three will start announcing their nickname and AS number (1-3) to the channels listed as last parameters.

Received announcements will then be forwarded to all other channels and the own AS-number appended(!) to the aspath.

Note: We are of course NOT implementing the whole BGP protocol and do not support things like withdrawals.

Testing convergence

The command msg:nickname:Text message can be used to send a message to the nickname given, if it was announced by somebody in the 'network'. Bots will print the message as debugging output.