XORP

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XORP, or Extensible Open Router Platform, is an open source routing software suite, aimed at being both stable and fully featured enough for production use and also extensible to support networking research. The project was founded by Mark Handley in 2000, with first production release in July 2004. The project is now headed by Atanu Ghosh of the International Computer Science Institute, in Berkeley, California. The current XORP release is version 1.4.

As of 2007, the code supports the following routing protocols:

BGP, including multiprotocol extensions for IPv6, Route Reflection, Confederations, Communities.
RIP v2 for IPv4, and RIPng for IPv6
OSPF RFC2328 (OSPFv2) and RFC2740 (OSPFv3) for both IPv4 and IPv6
PIM Sparse Mode for both IPv4 and IPv6
IGMP v1, v2 and v3 (IPv4 only protocol)
MLD v1 and v2 (IPv6 only protocol)

The XORP codebase consists of around 500,000 lines of C++, and is fairly portable running on FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X and there is even a port to Windows Server 2003 which only supports IPv4.

[edit] Interface Style

The interface of xorpsh (the terminal environment of the XORP router platform) is quite similar to that of Juniper's JunOS platform. This contrasts with the common Cisco IOS style of interface.

[edit] Live CD

If you want to try out XORP, the easiest way is to download the Vyatta OFR Live CD, which is a small Linux distribution employing XORP, especially designed as a router platform. The XORP project also has their own Live CD, but is not as well presented as the Vyatta OFR Live CD.