bird/README

                       BIRD Internet Routing Daemon

                     Home page  http://bird.network.cz/
                  Mailing list  bird-users@network.cz

                (c) 1998--2008  Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
                (c) 1998--2000  Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
                (c) 1998--2008  Ondrej Filip <feela@network.cz>
                (c) since 2009  CZ.NIC z.s.p.o.

================================================================================

BIRD is a dynamic IP routing daemon with full support of many modern routing
protocols, easy to use configuration interface and
powerful route filtering language, supporting Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.
BIRD is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

What do we support
==================

	o  Both IPv6 and IPv4
	o  Multiple routing tables
	o  Border Gateway Protocol (BGPv4)
	o  Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2, RIPng)
	o  Open Shortest Path First protocol (OSPFv2, OSPFv3)
	o  Babel Routing Protocol (Babel)
	o  Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)
	o  IPv6 router advertisements
	o  MRT dumping and BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP)
	o  Route Origin Authorization (ROA) and RTR protocol (RPKI)
	o  MPLS and basic L3VPN route transformations
	o  Route aggregation
	o  Static routes
	o  Inter-table protocol (Pipe)
	o  Command-line interface allowing on-line control and inspection of
	   status of the daemon
	o  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
	o  Powerful language for route filtering, see filter/test.conf
	   for exhaustive demonstration
	o  Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD ports

How to install BIRD
===================

	o  From standard distribution package of your OS (recommended)
	o  From official binary packages for Debian and Ubuntu
	   https://pkg.labs.nic.cz/doc/?project=bird
	   and also CentOS
	   ftp://bird.network.cz/pub/bird/centos
	   or Fedora
	   ftp://bird.network.cz/pub/bird/fedora
	o  From source code of the latest stable release version
	   ftp://bird.network.cz/pub/bird/
	o  From current development code in our Git repository
	   https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/bird/
	   (there are also autobuilds, look for the Downloads button
	    nearby the Clone button)

See the file INSTALL for information about installation from source code.

Documentation
=============

Online documentation is available at http://bird.network.cz/?get_doc or as HTML
files in the doc directory, you can install it by `make install-docs' and
rebuild it by `make docs', but you'll need SGMLtools and LaTeX to be installed
on your machine. You can also download a neatly formatted PDF version as
a separate archive (bird-doc-*.tar.gz) from ftp://bird.network.cz/pub/bird/

User support
============

If you want to help us debugging, enhancing and porting BIRD or just lurk
around to see what's going to develop, feel free to subscribe to the BIRD
users mailing list bird-users@network.cz, just send `subscribe' to
bird-request@network.cz. Bug reports, suggestions, feature requests and
code are welcome! We don't use gitlab issues for reporting, sorry.

Subscribe:	http://bird.network.cz/mailman/listinfo/bird-users/
Archive:	http://bird.network.cz/pipermail/bird-users/

For commercial support options, see https://bird.nic.cz/en/commercial-services/

Contributing
============

Simple patches can be sent directly to the users mailing list. With more
elaborate contributions, please create your own fork and send just a link
to your public repository, including the appropriate branch name(s)
and Git commit hash(es)

Please note that we are keeping mergability of the stable version 2 with
the multithreaded version 3. Every contribution must be mergable to both
branches master and thread-next. In case of collisions, the contributor
shall provide two branches / patches, one mergable to master, another
to thread-next.

Alternatively, the contributor may omit the version 2 implementation and
contribute to version 3 only. We are planning to declare the version 3
stable as soon as possible. Don't worry, your contribution won't be lost.

If you need any help of guidance, feel free to ask. The maintainers are
quite busy though (as of Jan 2024). You are expected to ping the maintainers
relentlessly until they react and review your contributions.

Licence
=======

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA

History
=======

BIRD development started as a student project at the Faculty of Math
and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic under supervision
of RNDr. Libor Forst <forst@cuni.cz>. BIRD has been developed and supported
by CZ.NIC z.s.p.o. http://www.nic.cz/ since 2009.

At the end of the year 2023, support for versions 1.x has been discontinued.
If you are still running BIRD 1, please upgrade to BIRD 2.

Good Luck and enjoy the BIRD :)
						The BIRD Team