Dummy BGP Routes

[adamcirillo]

is there a way to insert some dummy ipv4/6 routes into BGP on a router and then use eBGP to peer the routes into the lab to make some routes for the default routing table?

[jbemmel]

See

netlab/tests/integration/bgp/04-originate.yml

Line 19 in 379026a

bgp.originate: [ 172.42.42.0/24 ]

for an example

[adamcirillo]

i was more thinking of a way to say generate a like a couple hundred subnets with random addresses

[sdargoeuves]

That's a topic I wanted to explore a few weeks ago, but other priorities took over.
Something like this could work: https://www.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/om4lb2/lab_env_getting_the_full_route_table/
I haven't explored further, exaBgp could be an option. I'll try to find the interesting resources I found whilst digging, if that could be interesting.

[jbemmel]

i was more thinking of a way to say generate a like a couple hundred subnets with random addresses

You could write a plugin to generate bgp.originate statements along these lines

[ipspace]

As @jbemmel said, netlab supports only "static" origination of BGP routes, either via extra loopbacks, bgp.originate parameter (only for IPv4) or bgp.originate plugin (IPv4 and IPv6).

To get a couple hundred subnets, it's probably best to investigate a BGP daemon that would insert routes from whatever source (even with a plugin generating the prefixes the routes would have to be configured on a network device which might take a bit of time). bgpipe might be able to do the trick, see https://blog.ipspace.net/2024/08/netlab-bgpipe/ to get started.