Source of Cisco IOS "show ip bgp" screen outputs: archive.routeviews.org

It would not be easy for us to capture meaningful BGP table in the lab environment. An archive site of "University of Oregon Route Views Project" provides us such samples of captures.


Following the link "'sh ip bgp' format RIBs" on the front page we can go to a huge collection of "show ip bgp" (that is , printing out BGP table in Cisco IOS) output.  *** But, wait a moment here!

Why? Although each snapshot in the archive takes only around 30 Megabytes, in "bzip2" compressed format, it expands to near 1 Gigabytes after de-compression! That is, most Windows applications cannot handle well a file this large, and your computer might freeze after you try to open the file!

In Unix-like systems, you can use "head", "tail", "grep" utilities to get partial contents from the capture. In Windows, I can only use an CMD window with "type | more" command to get heading lines like this:

Status codes: s suppressed, d damped, h history, * valid, > best, i - internal,
              r RIB-failure, S Stale
Origin codes: i - IGP, e - EGP, ? - incomplete

   Network          Next Hop            Metric LocPrf Weight Path
*  0.0.0.0/0        96.4.0.55                0      0      0 11686 19151 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       95.140.80.254            0      0      0 31500 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       144.228.241.130          0      0      0 1239 7018 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       216.218.252.164          0      0      0 6939 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       64.71.255.61             0      0      0 812 1273 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       154.11.11.113            0      0      0 852 174 3549 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       209.161.175.4            0      0      0 14608 4323 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       208.51.134.246       13928      0      0 3549 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       154.11.98.225            0      0      0 852 174 3549 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       167.142.3.6              0      0      0 5056 7018 4788 i
*  1.9.0.0/16       147.28.7.1               0      0      0 3130 2914 4788 i

And yes! It is really a "show ip bgp" capture! Cheers!

[URLs]

• University of Oregon Route Views Project
• University of Oregon Route Views Archive Project, David Meyer

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Side notes: You might be like me following another link on the same page:

route dampening data from route-views3.route-views.org 

I found the data was not correctly collected after March 10, 2010. I Email notified the site administrator. I hope they would fix it soon!