How-To: Setting up BGP on Vyatta

1 minute read

Vyatta is a Linux based distro that ease the set up of VPN, Routers, antivirus…. It has a really small footprint on your system as it only requires something like 800M to be installed and is based on Debian. On the top of that, it offers configuration wrappers to facilitate service settings.

This tutorial will explain how to set up 2 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) boxes to route the traffic from one Autonomous System (AS) to the other using Vyatta.

Vyatta Community Edition 4.1.4 was used during this set up.

This tutorial will assume that you know how to install vyatta, but really, it is just a matter of inserting the CD in the drive an typing:

# install-system

I recommend that you check on Vyatta website for more information on this part.

1. Settings used

This tutorial will be using 2 Vyatta VMs that will have 3 interfaces:

  • 1 connected to the Internet (WAN) 192.168.2.0/24 (yeah right, they are natted)
  • 1 connected to a common network (LAN) 172.16.163.0/24
  • 1 connected to their on AS (AS1 and AS2) respectively 1.1.1.0/24 and 2.2.2.0/24

The Vyatta VMs will be called vyatta-bgp1 and vyatta-bgp2.

1.1. vyatta-bgp1

vyatta-bgp1 will have its interfaces set up as follow:

  • eth0 192.168.2.10
  • eth1 172.16.163.1
  • eth2 1.1.1.1
  • default route to 192.168.2.1

It will advertise AS 1 with network 1.1.1.0/24 to its neighbor AS 2 at IP 172.16.163.2 with password “BGPtutorial”.

1.2. vyatta-bgp2

vyatta-bgp2 will have its interfaces set up as follow:

  • eth0 192.168.2.20
  • eth1 172.16.163.2
  • eth2 2.2.2.1
  • default route to 192.168.2.1

It will advertise AS 2 with network 2.2.2.0/24 to its neighbor AS 1 at IP 172.16.163.1 with password “BGPtutorial”.

Next, we will set the BGP interfaces.