Quagga Basic Configuration

A very basic guide to getting quagga up and running (I did this in a virtualbox environment using a Ubuntu  Mini ISO - if you do a minimal install with no xserver and 128MB RAM it runs just fine).

First install quagga:
#sudo apt-get install quagga

Quagga configuration files are contained in /etc/quagga. Before doing anything you will find two files in there called daemons and debian.conf. Open daemons:

#sudo nano /etc/quagga/daemons

Here you can configure which routing protocol daemons you want to use. Scroll down to the bottom of the file and change any entries to YES for daemons you wish to use - Zebra should be enabled as a minimum. For example to use RIP and BGP you would configure as follows:

zebra=yes
bgpd=yes
ripd=yes

Everything else can be left as NO. Save the file and exit (CTRL X and "yes" to save)

Before starting quagga you need to create a configuration file for each of the daemons specified above. The files need to be writable or you can't save your config:

#cd /etc/quagga
#sudo touch zebra.conf bgpd.conf ripd.conf
#sudo chmod 777 /etc/quagga/*.conf

Edit the zebra.conf file:

#sudo nano /etc/quagga/zebra.conf

Add the line:

password password

This sets your password to "password" - feel free to choose a more cryptic password if you are feeling adventurous. Save the file and exit (CTRL X and "yes" to save).

We can now start quagga:

#sudo /etc/init.d/quagga start

You can access quagga by going to:

#telnet localhost zebra

This is a bare minimum configuration to get things started - there is still lots more to do from here but this will at least get the services running and allow you to login.