Is there a way to use BFD with FRR? (alternatively: are there plans to upgrade to FRR 6.0?)

davidbalbert

Hi there,

I'm running pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p1 with FRR 0.2_4 so I can have a BGP session with my upstream provider. I'd like to speak BFD with my ISP so that we can get fast failover if our primary connection goes down.

Is it currently possible to configure pfSense to speak BFD in concert with FRR's BGP daemon? There have been some mentions (ex1, ex2) of using ptmd, but nothing conclusive. There's not a ptmd pfSense package, nor any other packages I could find that look like they support BFD.

Alternatively: The pfSense FRR package uses FRR 5.0. A BFD daemon was added in FRR 6.0, which was released in August, 2018. Are there any plans to upgrade the pfSense FRR package to use 6.0 with BFD support, and if so, is there a timeline for when this will happen?

Thanks,
Dave

jimp

No means to use BFD at the moment.

I haven't looked at FRR 6 yet, but it will come along eventually, probably with 2.4.5, earlier if it isn't a dependency nightmare.

They love increasing the major version number at the drop of a hat, even for relatively minor releases. It makes following along more difficult than it should be. Though because the changes are also not typically major, updating is usually not much more than changing the dependency of the frr package to point at the new frr port (net/frr6 in this case).

davidbalbert

Great, thanks. I'll keep an eye out for FRR 6.

ebelange

@jimp Is there any update on this topic? I'm running FRR 0.6.4 on pfSense 2.4.4 but i don't see any options for BFD. Would like to use it to implement fast convergence for OSPF routes with Cisco L3 switches.

Thank you.

jimp

No. It hasn't been implemented and there are no immediate plans to do so.

ccb056

Also looking forward for implementation of this.

I run a pfsense machine inside China's great firewall and fast failover of BGP within ipsec tunnels would be helpful.