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What do you use for visualizing your BGP topology when you're poor?

Networking by hankels 33 replies 5.1K views
paolo62

Member

#31

Did anyone actually solve this?

tallinnying said:
At 3am I wrote this
I keep coming back to this thread because your 3am line-with-boxes is basically where I landed too. Except I used mermaid-cli in a git hook so it regenerates when I push config. Still janky. Has anyone tried bullying one of these newer LLMs into parsing `show ip bgp summary` into something sane? I got decent dot output from one last week but it hallucinated two peers that don't exist. Almost worth it for the 30 seconds of hope.

beto60

Member

#32

89 days, nice. I was about to suggest the same thing tallinnying did but worse.

I just use `bgpq4` to build prefix lists and stare at `show ip bgp` until the pattern clicks. No boxes, no lines, just vibes.

tallinnying said:
It makes a line. With boxes. My brain accepts it.

This is the real insight. The tool doesn't matter, it's whether your brain accepts it. Mine accepts nothing so I draw on paper and lose the paper.

Did anyone actually get graphviz working without the 2am debugging spiral. Asking for a friend (me, I am the friend)

I usually check https://bgp.tools when I need to sanity-check what I'm seeing, but it's not really visualization.

dadlime

Member

stable > testing

#33

Late to this, but

tallinnying said:
At 3am I wrote this
is exactly the energy that keeps infrastructure running.

I did the graphviz thing once for a Contabo migration. Took longer than the migration itself and was wrong within a week because someone added a prepend I didn't notice. These days I keep a text file with ASN paths and update it when something breaks. Not visualization, but it's honest work.

Did anyone actually stick with a tool long enough for it to stay accurate? That's the part I never solved.

tallinnying

Member

Night Shift

#34

Red for eBGP, blue for iBGP. My brain still accepts it

annexbi said:
Someone already wrote a script (probably abandoned (definitely abandoned))
This is the way

builds at 3AM, sleeps at noon

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