frr-docker

Building FRR Docker Image

docker build -t frr:dev .

Running FRR Container

PATH_TO_SOURCE=/home/user/sources

mkdir -pv $PATH_TO_SOURCE
cd $PATH_TO_SOURCE
git clone https://github.com/FRRouting/frr.git

# After these two commands a shell inside the FRR instance will be opened
# with tmux and you can use as a regular FRR router.
FRR_HOSTNAME='frr-1'

docker run --interactive --tty --privileged --init \
  --volume "$PATH_TO_SOURCE:/usr/src" \
  --hostname $FRR_HOSTNAME --name $FRR_HOSTNAME \
  frr:dev

# On a different terminal
FRR_HOSTNAME='frr-2'

docker run --interactive --tty --privileged --init \
  --volume "$PATH_TO_SOURCE:/usr/src" \
  --hostname $FRR_HOSTNAME --name $FRR_HOSTNAME \
  frr:dev

# On a different terminal
docker network create frr-net1
docker network connect frr-net1 frr-1
docker network connect frr-net1 frr-2

# Now you can configure routing protocols between `frr-1` and `frr-2`
#
# Interface `eth0` will always be connected to the internet and `ethX`
# will be the interfaces configured with
# `docker network connect frr-netX frr-X`.

(Re)building FRR

If you changed the source code you'll want to run frr-build.sh. The build script builds and installs FRR using the sources found on /usr/src/frr.

Run frr-build.sh --help for more information.

Docker Image Details

The default 'init' (initialization) script is frr-start.sh. It is called once on startup to setup the container environment (see container-init.sh) and start tmux as the main process (if it dies the container goes away with all process).

Here are some of the default tmux bindings for quick-start:

CTRL-b c - Create new window and switch to it
CTRL-b n - Change screen to next window
CTRL-b p - Change screen to previous window
CTRL-b d - Detatch from tmux (effectively kills all processes and exit)

Troubleshooting

FRR is using too much virtual memory or it is too slow to stop with /usr/lib/frr/watchfrr.sh stop.

This is probably releated with the container default file descriptors limit.

You can check your current container limit with: ulimit -n. If the value is too high it means FRR will try to allocate a lot of memory (Linux won't actually allocate until you use it) and when you shutdown the libfrr will iterate over all allocated entries to attempt to close() file descriptors and reset the value.

You can configure this value in /etc/frr/daemons by editing the variable (or uncommenting) MAX_FDS or by passing the command line argument --limit-fds to individual daemon.

FRR startup fails with "fork: not enough memory".

See item (1) above.

FRR is behaving unexpectedly or is crashing.

FRR will try to use syslog for logging, but no syslog daemons are configured by default. If you want to save the FRR daemons log you can change /etc/frr/daemons and append the command line options --log file:/var/log/frr/<daemon>.log --log-level debug to get them saved in /var/log/frr/<daemon>.log.

In case of crashes you may check /var/log/frr/<daemon>-<pid> files since the container is configured to save them there by default.

frr-build.sh by default uses dev builds which means the binaries will have all symbols. This means you can debug FRR daemons with gdb.