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Scheduled Tasks

Peering Manager can run scheduled tasks to speed up some processes.

Before adding any of these tasks in a cron file, make sure that they use the Python virtual environment if you have one for Peering Manager (you should).

Since it is based on the PeeringDB API, querying these API can take quite a lot of time depending of the data that is needed to be retrieved. To avoid such time loss, Peering Manager is able to cache some of this data in its local database. This is required if you want to use PeeringDB data inside Peering Manager.

Caching in the Local Database

Assuming that Peering Manager is installed at /opt/peering-manager the following command will retrieve data from PeeringDB and store it locally. It will also take care of updating data from AS you are peering with if they have matching PeeringDB records.

# venv/bin/python3 manage.py peeringdb_sync

Note: PEERINGDB_API_KEY must be set in configuration if you wish to sync Email Contacts from PeeringDB.

This command does not need to be run very often. For example, running it every 5 minutes is overkill, running it once a day should be enough.

The first cache synchronization can take a lot of time due to the amount of data to be stored. Later runs will be faster because only the differences with the previous synchronization will be retrieved.

This command can be called with the --flush option to remove synchronized items.

# venv/bin/python3 manage.py peeringdb_sync --flush

Automatic Configuration Deployment

If Peering Manager is used to generate configuration stanzas and push them to routers, this task can be automated using the given command.

# venv/bin/python3 manage.py configure_routers --no-commit-check

This will generate the configuration for each router and push it. If there are no new peering sessions to be deployed, this command is also useful to deploy any new configuration information, such as maximum prefix changes peers may have made against existing peering sessions.

If the --no-commit-check flag is set, the command will try to push the configuration on the router without checking if there are any changes to be deployed.

If the --limit flag is set, it expects a list of router hostnames on which the new configuration must be installed. The router hostnames must be separated by commas without spaces.

If the --tasks flag is set, it will schedule background tasks for running multiple configuration processes instead of running it as part of the command process.

If no configuration template is attached to a given router, it will be ignored during the execution of the task.

Poll BGP Sessions

Poll BGP sessions to update values shown in Peering Manager. The sessions must be attached to a router, via a BGP group or a connection to an IXP for them to be polled. The router must be enabled for polling too.

A --limit flag is available to limit the polling process to a given set of routers, thanks to a comma separated list of hostnames.

A --tasks flag is available to schedule background tasks for running multiple polling processes instead of running it as part of the command process.

# venv/bin/python3 manage.py poll_bgp_sessions

Storing IRR AS-SET Prefixes

Calling bgpq3 each time to generate a prefix list for an autonomous system is quite time consuming, even more if the prefix list is large. A command is provided to perform the bgpq3 calls and store the results in the database for later use. A lookup in a database being less time consuming, this can improve prefix list generation in template significantly. Note that there are no invalidations of the prefixes found in the database, so make sure to run this command at regular intervals to keep data up-to-date.

# venv/bin/python3 manage.py grab_prefixes --limit 100

If the --limit 100 flag is set, the command will not store prefixes for an IP family if the number of prefixes is greater than 100. This can help to avoid storing large number of prefixes for a single autonomous system, preventing out of memory errors for future database lookups.

Automatic execution

To avoid executing these commands by hand (which could be annoying) they can be run automatically.

systemd

Beside the systemd units for the main application and worker, the contrib-Repository also contains units to run the previously metioned tasks. After copying the files, you have to enable the timer units you want to use by running systemctl enable peering-manager_peeringdb-sync.timer --now.

CRON

30 2 * * * user cd /opt/peering-manager && venv/bin/python3 manage.py peeringdb_sync
55 * * * * user cd /opt/peering-manager && venv/bin/python3 manage.py configure_routers
0  * * * * user cd /opt/peering-manager && venv/bin/python3 manage.py poll_peering_sessions --all
30 4 * * * user cd /opt/peering-manager && venv/bin/python3 manage.py grab_prefixes