                       BIRD Internet Routing Daemon

                     Home page  http://bird.nic.cz/
                  Mailing list  bird-users@network.cz

                (c) 1998--2008  Martin Mares <mj@ucw.cz>
                (c) 1998--2000  Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
                (c) 1998--2008  Ondrej Filip <feela@network.cz>
                (c) 2009--now   CZ.NIC z.s.p.o.

================================================================================

BIRD is a dynamic IP routing daemon with full support of most modern routing
protocols, easy to use configuration interface and powerful route filtering
language, primarily targeted on (but not limited to) Linux and other UNIX-like
systems and distributed under the GNU General Public License.

What do we support
==================

	o  Both IPv4 and IPv6
	o  Multiple routing tables
	o  Border Gateway Protocol (BGPv4)
	o  Routing Information Protocol (RIPv2, RIPng)
	o  Open Shortest Path First protocol (OSPFv2, OSPFv3)
	o  Babel Routing Protocol (Babel)
	o  Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD)
	o  IPv6 router advertisements
	o  Static routes
	o  Inter-table protocol
	o  Command-line interface allowing on-line control and inspection of
	   status of the daemon
	o  Soft reconfiguration, no need to use complex online commands to
	   change the configuration, just edit the configuration file and notify
	   BIRD to re-read it and it will smoothly switch itself to the new
	   configuration, not disturbing routing protocols unless they are
	   affected by the configuration changes
	o  Powerful language for route filtering, see doc/bird.conf.example
	o  Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD ports

How to install BIRD
===================

	o  From standard distribution package of your OS (recommended)
	o  From official binary repositories for Debian and Ubuntu
	   https://pkg.labs.nic.cz/doc/?project=bird
	o  From source code of the latest stable release version
	   https://bird.nic.cz/get-bird/
	o  From current development code in Git repository
	   https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/bird/

See the file INSTALL for information about installation from source code.

Documentation
=============

Online documentation is available at https://bird.nic.cz/doc/latest/.

You can also build separate HTML files and PDF from the doc directory by
`make docs' and install it by `make install-docs', but you'll need SGMLtools
and LaTeX to be installed on your machine.

You can also download a neatly formatted PDF version (packed in TGZ)
from the online documentation page at https://bird.nic.cz/doc/latest/

User support
============

If you want to help us debugging, enhancing and porting BIRD or just lurk
around to see what's going to develop, feel free to subscribe to the BIRD
users mailing list bird-users@network.cz, just send `subscribe' to
bird-request@network.cz.

Subscribe:	http://bird.network.cz/mailman/listinfo/bird-users/
Archive:	http://bird.network.cz/pipermail/bird-users/

Please don't send security issues to the mailing-list, contact us instead at
bird-support@network.cz which is a private e-mail address where you also can
get commercial support for your BIRD deployment.

We don't use our gitlab issues for reporting but we're partially tracking
the core developent team's work there publicly.

Contributing
============

Please see the CONTRIBUTING.md file to find how to contribute to BIRD.

License
=======

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

History
=======

BIRD development started as a student project at the Faculty of Math
and Physics, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic under supervision
of RNDr. Libor Forst <forst@cuni.cz>. BIRD has been developed and supported
by CZ.NIC z.s.p.o. http://www.nic.cz/ since 2009.


Good Luck and enjoy the BIRD :)
						The BIRD Team
