1.1 About Zebra

Today, TCP/IP networks are covering all of the world. The Internet has been deployed in many countries, companies, and to the home. When you connect to the Internet your packet will pass many routers which have TCP/IP routing functionality.

A system with Zebra installed acts as a dedicated router. With Zebra, your machine exchanges routing information with other routers using routing protocols. Zebra uses this information to update the kernel routing table so that the right data goes to the right place. You can dynamically change the configuration and you may view routing table information from the Zebra terminal interface.

Adding to routing protocol support, Zebra can setup interface's flags, interface's address, static routes and so on. If you have a small network, or a stub network, or xDSL connection, configuring the Zebra routing software is very easy. The only thing you have to do is to set up the interfaces and put a few commands about static routes and/or default routes. If the network is rather large, or if the network structure changes frequently, you will want to take advantage of Zebra's dynamic routing protocol support for protocols such as RIP, OSPF or BGP. Zebra is with you.

Traditionally, UNIX based router configuration is done by ifconfig and route commands. Status of routing table is displayed by netstat utility. Almost of these commands work only if the user has root privileges. Zebra has a different system administration method. There are two user modes in Zebra. One is normal mode, the other is enable mode. Normal mode user can only view system status, enable mode user can change system configuration. This UNIX account independent feature will be great help to the router administrator.

Currently, Zebra supports common unicast routing protocols. Multicast routing protocols such as BGMP, PIM-SM, PIM-DM will be supported in Zebra 2.0. MPLS support is going on. In the future, TCP/IP filtering control, QoS control, diffserv configuration will be added to Zebra. Zebra project's final goal is making a productive, quality free TCP/IP routing software.