The name `BIRD' is actually an acronym standing for `BIRD Internet Routing Daemon'. Let's take a closer look at the meaning of the name:
BIRD: Well, we think we have already explained that. It's an acronym standing for `BIRD Internet Routing Daemon', you remember, don't you? :-)
Internet Routing: It's a program (well, a daemon, as you are going to discover in a moment) which works as a dynamic router in an Internet type network (that is, in a network running either the IPv4 or the IPv6 protocol). Routers are devices which forward packets between interconnected networks in order to allow hosts not connected directly to the same local area network to communicate with each other. They also communicate with the other routers in the Internet to discover the topology of the network which allows them to find optimal (in terms of some metric) rules for forwarding of packets (which are called routing tables) and to adapt themselves to the changing conditions such as outages of network links, building of new connections and so on. Most of these routers are costly dedicated devices running obscure firmware which is hard to configure and not open to any changes (on the other hand, their special hardware design allows them to keep up with lots of high-speed network interfaces, better than general-purpose computer does). Fortunately, most operating systems of the UNIX family allow an ordinary computer to act as a router and forward packets belonging to the other hosts, but only according to a statically configured table.
A Routing Daemon is in UNIX terminology a non-interactive program running on background which does the dynamic part of Internet routing, that is it communicates with the other routers, calculates routing tables and sends them to the OS kernel which does the actual packet forwarding. There already exist other such routing daemons: routed (RIP only), GateD (non-free), Zebra http://www.zebra.org and MRTDhttp://sourceforge.net/projects/mrt, but their capabilities are limited and they are relatively hard to configure and maintain.
BIRD is an Internet Routing Daemon designed to avoid all of these shortcomings, to support all the routing technology used in the today's Internet or planned to be used in near future and to have a clean extensible architecture allowing new routing protocols to be incorporated easily. Among other features, BIRD supports:
- both IPv4 and IPv6 protocols
- multiple routing tables
- the Border Gateway Protocol (BGPv4)
- the Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2)
- the Open Shortest Path First protocol (OSPFv2, OSPFv3)
- a virtual protocol for exchange of routes between different routing tables on a single host
- a command-line interface allowing on-line control and inspection of status of the daemon
- soft reconfiguration (no need to use complex online commands to change the configuration, just edit the configuration file and notify BIRD to re-read it and it will smoothly switch itself to the new configuration, not disturbing routing protocols unless they are affected by the configuration changes)
- a powerful language for route filtering
BIRD has been developed at the Faculty of Math and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic as a student project. It can be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
BIRD has been designed to work on all UNIX-like systems. It has been developed and tested under Linux 2.0 to 2.6, and then ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, porting to other systems (even non-UNIX ones) should be relatively easy due to its highly modular architecture.
