title: experimenting with BGP using Quagga and a set of openWrt routers
body: <p>I want to learn and experiment with BGP protocol by some non-trivial scenarios: setup anycasting, see how quickly and what way routing changes after I disconnect some link, etc. As I understand I cannot easily and should not do it on "the real internet" as I would need to register/obtain an Autonomous System(s), obtain a pool of some IP addresses etc, not to mention a chaos I could cause by my experiments.</p>
  
  <p>Therefore I'm considering buying few (5-6) cheap, openWRT compatible routers (I was thinking about <a href="https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/mikrotik_rb750gr3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MikroTik RB750Gr3</a>), setting up my own small isolated "clone of the internet" and play with BGP using Quagga that I would install on these routers. So now I need help with verifying whether my idea makes sense:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>is my understanding (described at the beginning) that I cannot/should not do it on "the real internet" correct? or maybe there are some publicly available "sandboxes" that would allow me to experiment?</p></li>
  <li><p>is it even possible to create such a small isolated clone of the internet as I described or maybe it will not work because of some reasons that I'm missing? (for example some central registry like IANA would need to be also present on my clone or something else that I'm not aware of?)</p></li>
  <li><p>is there maybe an easier/simpler way to conduct such experiments than by purchasing several routers? Maybe I could somehow create several interconnected virtual networks on Qemu-KVM/libvirt instead and play there? (I couldn't google anything related)</p></li>
  <li><p>is Quagga BGP software capable of doing what I intend or maybe it has some limitations which will not allow me to try some/many of the typical "real internet" scenarios?</p></li>
  <li><p>assuming that I'm more or less on the right track up to this moment, is the <a href="https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/mikrotik_rb750gr3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MikroTik RB750Gr3</a> a good model to conduct such experiments? or maybe I could use something significantly cheaper? or maybe the opposite: I need something "more capable"?</p></li>
  <li><p>are there any resources on the web that describe more or less the thing that I intend to do? so far I found mostly either very high-level overviews of BGP or documents that describe situation from the point of view of a single AS.</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I've asked this question originally on <a href="https://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/67176/experimenting-with-bgp-using-quagga-and-a-set-of-openwrt-routers">network engineering stackexchange</a>, but it turned that openWRT and Quagga are forbidden topics there, so it was closed immediately: hope here is a good place ;)</p>