Calculator written in route-map

[jrex at CS.Princeton.EDU (Jennifer Rexford)]

Job,

Fun!  More generally, BGP has the same computing power as a Turing Machine:

  Marco Chiesa, Luca Cittadini, Guiseppe Di Battista, Laurent Vanbever, and Stefano Vissicchio
  Using routers to build logic circuits: How powerful is BGP? (ICNP'13)
  http://vanbever.eu/pdfs/vanbever_turing_icnp_2013.pdf

-- Jen


On Apr 1, 2014, at 11:11 AM, Job Snijders <job at instituut.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> Do you often find yourself in need of a simple calculator, and all you have
> available to you is a Brocade or Cisco IOS router?  No longer will you
> experience the horror and dread of mental arithmetics. The route-map calculator
> is here!
> 
> Brocade   : http://instituut.net/~job/calculator-route-map.brocade.txt
> Cisco IOS : http://instituut.net/~job/calculator-route-map.ioscisco.txt
>            (file size ~ 12 megabyte)
> 
> In general I don't find route-maps useful to accomplish, well, anything.
> However, this is a striking example of re-usable configuration that has
> a measurable impact on daily operations! 
> 
> Calculations can be performed with integers between 1 and 256. The
> answer will be presented as a rounded positive integer. In case the
> calculation would result in a negative integer, larger than 2^16
> (65536), an helpful error message is generated: 65000:7777. For
> divisions and substractions the order of the BGP communities is
> relevant, one must always place the operator first!
> 
> arithmetic operators:
> 
>  'add' operator community:        65000:1
>  'multiply' operator community:   65000:2
>  'substract' operator community:  65000:3
>  'divide' operator community:     65000:4
> 
> example output:
> 
>  telnet at input-router#show ip bgp routes detail 10.1.1.1 | i COMMUNITIES
>              COMMUNITIES: 65000:2 0:63 0:113    ! calculate 63 * 113 
>  telnet at input-router#
> 
>  telnet at calculator#show ip bgp routes detail 10.1.1.1 | i COMMUNITIES
>              COMMUNITIES: 0:7119                ! result: 7119
>  telnet at calculator#
> 
> Super convenient right?!
> 
> WARNING: due to IOS/Ironware architecture this route-map consumes quite
> some memory. Always test in a lab before deploying in production!
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Job
>