-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Vincent Gillet Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 4:46 AM To: Stephane Bortzmeyer Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Looking glasses with programmatic interface? Hi Stephane,
I'm surprised to see that every looking glass I know is only reachable via an interface made for humans, not for programs. When you want to query the LG via a program (for instance to monitor your routes on a distant LG), you need to emulate an human being and parse HTML (or sometimes Cisco text) replies.
Public looking glass are for humans. I do not want my looking-glass being heavily loaded by cron tool. looking-glass use router CPU and i do not want to see a foolish guy to put a : * * * * * Crontab ... Route-server is a solution to have load CPU router. Vincent. ----- This raises a good point. Since most LGs are running on a dedicated web server somewhere inside of a network, one could very easily install zebra on this webserver with a read-only BGP image from several internal routers [say all the borders]. This has two benefits: a) Queries do not bog down production routers in fact the load is linear, and b) The LG tool only need look at localhost for all answers. This only costs 120mb of RAM per view and saves network overhead to boot. Traceroutes may need to still go out to the end router, but I doubt anyone would allow a query to those in an automated fashion. Deepak Jain AiNET