bgplgsh(8)

bgplgsh8

Looking glass shell for the openbsd border gateway protocol daemon

Usage

bgplgsh

Overview

The bgplgsh program is a looking glass shell for the bgpd(8) Border Gateway Protocol daemon. The looking glass will provide a simple command line interface with read-only access to a restricted set of bgpd(8) and system status information, which is typically used on route servers by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet eXchange points (IXs).

It requires three steps to enable the looking glass shell:

  1. Add bgplgsh as a valid login shell. See shells(5) for more information.

    # echo /usr/bin/bgplgsh  /etc/shells
  2. Create a new user for restricted looking glass access. See adduser(8) for more information about system user management.

    # adduser -shell bgplgsh -batch bgplg
    # passwd bgplg
  3. Start the Border Gateway Protocol daemon with a second, restricted, control socket. See bgpd.conf(5) and bgplg(8) for more information.

    For example, add the following to /etc/bgpd.conf to have bgpd(8) open a second, restricted, control socket:

    socket "/var/www/run/bgpd.rsock" restricted

Files

/var/www/run/bgpd.rsock

Position of the second, restricted, control socket of bgpd(8).

Caveats

To prevent commands from running endlessly, bgplgsh will kill the corresponding processes after a hard limit of 60 seconds. For example, this can take effect when using traceroute(8) with blackholed or bad routes.

Releases

41 releases since OpenBSD 4.1; the text changed 7 times.

  1. 4.1
  2. 4.2–4.8
  3. 4.9–5.1
  4. 5.2
  5. 5.3
  6. 5.4–5.8
  7. 5.9–6.4
  8. 6.5–8.0

History

The bgplgsh program first appeared in OpenBSD 4.1. The initial implementation was done in 2005 for DE-CIX, the German commercial internet exchange point.

Authors

The bgplgsh program was written by Reyk Floeter ⟨[email protected]⟩.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.